Suchergebnisse

AbstractIn the face of "permanent welfare austerity," the European Union (EU) is increasingly involved in the governance of health care through various "new governance" tools. This development coincides with a growing interest in modernization of welfare, including health care. One of the fundamental critiques of new governance in the EU context concerns the (perceived) inability of new governance to protect the "social" against the "market" in Europe's constitutional settlement. Using multi‐level governance and constructivist approaches, this article considers whether the EU's governance of health care via the "Open Method of Coordination" advances a neo‐liberal agenda of health care modernization.

This article focuses on a single case of a 'new governance' response to healthcare migration in the European Union: the EU Guidelines on block purchasing of cross-border healthcare 2005. Using this focus, the article highlights the differences between legal doctrinal analysis and other analytical or critical frameworks as applied to this new phenomenon of 'governance' in the European Union. It notes the predominant concerns of a 'legal' and a 'governance' framework for analysis. It then considers the basis of the Guidelines, the bodies concerned with their enforcement, the effects of the Guidelines, the relationship between law and implementation and the desirability of litigation, through each of the two analytical frameworks employed. Given the synergy between legal and new governance approaches to solving problems relating to healthcare migration in the EU, the article concludes that a synergistic framework for analysis, bringing together both 'legal' and 'governance' concerns, offers the most appropriate holistic approach for EU law and policy studies of this nature.

Cases involving patients such as Mrs Yvonne Watts, who travelled from the UK to France for a hip replacement to avoid a 'waiting list' in the UK, relying on rights in European Union (EU) law, attract high levels of media attention. While the vast majority of patients are either unwilling or unable to travel across borders to receive health care, it is clear that some patients are seeking health care abroad. Although data on patient mobility within the EU are significantly limited, nevertheless, a relatively steady, small but not insignificant number of patients are moving across borders within the EU to receive health care. This paper considers the current legal framework on the rights in EU law of those patients who seek health care in another Member State. As the right to seek private health care abroad is (largely) non-contentious, and has been a well-established feature of EU law since at least the mid 1980s, the focus of this paper is on publicly or quasi-publicly funded health care.