Suchergebnisse

In a new case on patients seeking medical services abroad, the Leichtle case, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) confirmed its previous rulings on patient mobility. According to the Court, patients in the European Union have a (conditional) right to receive health care abroad, whereas the sickness fund should reimburse the costs of treatment and travel expenditures. As such, the Court has strengthened patient mobility in the European Union, based on the free movement principles. Now, it is up to the European Commission to develop a communal strategy aimed at further strengthening patients' rights in the Union.

Most of the European countries are confronted with health care system reforms. In Central and Eastern Europe, however, the countries face specific challenges. Whereas "socialist" governments traditionally have been deeply involved in all facets of health care, the general process of initiated market-oriented reforms has also affected the nature and scope of government intervention in health care. Stimulated by the successes of concepts such as decentralisation, deregulation, and privatisation in order to create a more flexible market economy, policy-makers also began to apply such notions to the health care sector. The experiences in the early 1990s however, revealed certain devastating effects of transposing the general concept of market competition to the field of health care. One valuable lesson of those developments was that liberalising relations in health care necessitates a certain degree of government intervention. Furthermore, the nature and scope of Central and Eastem European health care reforms differed from country to country with no uniform "blueprint" for reform, derived from emulating Western European experiences, being readily available. Nevertheless, previous experiences in reforming health care may provide us with valuable lessons. Their significanee needs, nonetheless, to be reviewed in accordance with specific national setting

Introduction: The biomedicine convention / André den Exter -- pt. 1. Setting the scene: human rights and health ethics. Dwelling on the threshold: on the interaction between the European Convention on human rights and the Biomedicine convention / Rick Lawson -- Promoting and applying bioethics: the ethics programme of UNESCO / Henk ten Have -- Universal principles and universal rights / Tom Beauchamp -- pt. 2. Equitable access to health care. Equality and the right to health care / Martin Biujsen and André den Exter -- The right to health care for vulnerable population groups in the Netherlands and Europe / Walter Devillé -- pt. 3. Medical research. Appropriate regulations for different types of medical research / Elmar Doppelfeld -- Regulatory discrepancies between the Council of Europe and the EU regarding biomedical research / Roberto Andorno -- pt. 4. Genetics and health care rights. Recent developments in the legal discourse on genetic testing in Germany / Jürgen Robienski and Jürgen Simon -- pt. 5. Patients rights. Patients' rights and human dignity / Carlos Romeo Casabona -- Patient rights in the United States: beyond or behind the Convention / Tim Stoltzfus Jost -- Protection of persons not able to consent: a feminist view / Hilde Lindemann -- pt. 6. Organ transplantation. Legal protection of the deceased organ donor in Europe / Herman Nys -- Organ donation from brain-dead donors: a dead end street / Erwin Kompanje -- Contributors -- About the Erasmus Observatory on Health Law -- Annex: Convention for the protection of human rights and dignity of the human being with regard to the application of biology and medicine: convention on human rights and biomedicine.