The recession saw the household cutting consumption spending reshaping expenses behaviors with interesting nuances related to household’s demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. In this respect the role of macroeconomic factors like institutions in determining the consumption behaviors catches recently the attention of researchers. Based on the Household Budget Survey this paper analyse the effects of crisis on healthcare consumption focusing on the role of institutional quality, measured using the Institutional Quality Index (Nifo and Vecchione, 2014). Healthcare services have been appropriately distinguished between "medical/dental visits", "hospital admissions", "diagnostic investigations", "other healthcare services". Institutional quality emerge as a crucial factor in determining health care expenses out of the crisis. Where the local endowment of institutional quality is higher, the private expenses significantly decrease pointing out a strong inverse correlation between quality of private expense in healthcare: higher the quality of institutional quality, and then of public health services, lower the private expenditure. The recession seems to resets the impact of institutional quality on spending for health and increases the positive correlation with strictly microeconomic variables such as income, wealth and the number of household’s earners.