>are unemployed
Well, yes?
Bullshit. In Italy only the lowest income brackets get free healthcare, everyone else has various degree of copay. And even then you get terrible services, with queues several months long for exams and quality far inferior from what you get going trough the private sector.
And when I worked and lived in Dublin, same story, I had to pay 270€ for using emergency services at a public hospital and was lucky to have them covered by the private insurance my employer provided.
Proper dental procedures, substitutive hormone therapy, plenty rate stuff require specialists or medicines that mutua doesn't pass. heck if you have a condition that require a specialist during pregnancy you're going to have to pay everything out of your money to avoid the random ginecologist rotation, to the tune of 120€+/visit, and you're going to need ten or more if any complication arises.
This is the typical uninformed comment from some ableist that never actually had to suffer from the Italian healthcare beyond the most basic services.
Utterly false as a general rule, and free is not as glamorous as you make it sound like. Some doctors will refuse to see patients who are on the free healthcare system, too.
> if you need an expensive treatment
Yeah, if you can wait for it. Ever heard of surgery that sometimes take a year to reserve? Well that's the standard in Europe for certain conditions.