Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-25-Speech-4-015"
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"en.20080925.4.4-015"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner Vassiliou, Minister Bachelot-Narquin, last week I attended a presentation of a new website on patient rights in all the EU languages, organised by my Danish colleague in the ALDE Group, Karen Riis-Jørgensen.
There was a lady there from Denmark who very nearly might not have been. She had breast cancer and was not getting anywhere under the Danish system because she had the wrong number of tumours. If she had had five tumours she would have been treated, but she had seven and did not qualify under the criteria. So somehow or other she needed to get rid of two tumours before she could be helped. In short, an unending struggle. In the end she found help in Germany. She did it – she borrowed money from friends and family and went to Germany where she was helped. Her secondaries have now disappeared. She is cured, to the extent that you can ever say you are cured of cancer.
It is inhuman to make someone like that, an individual, battle against a system at a time when they are sick, at a time when they are as weak as they could possibly be. That is putting the system before the patient. I find it totally unacceptable! The Danes did in the end pay for much of the treatment, and all was well in the end. But what that woman had to go through was not exceptional; it happens all too often.
So the European Commission's proposal is a huge step forward to help these patients and my group is very keen to support it. We also need to ensure that this debate does not turn into an ideological debate. This is not just another directive about health services. This is not about how to reform health in the European Union. It is not about whether or not there should be a free market in healthcare. To my mind it is not really a matter of subsidiarity either. The question is not whether the Member States prevail or the Union. No, the question is whether or not the patient wins out. That is all that matters really. We shall definitely have to talk about all these other things, perhaps argue about them robustly during the election campaign, but in my view and that of my group they are not our concern today.
We are not trying to harmonise health, now is not the right time for that and maybe it cannot be done anyway. But we must learn to make use of the opportunities which the European Union offers us, the economies of scale we can benefit from, so that real specialist help can be provided to people with rare medical conditions. That possibility has of course existed for years, but now we really can make use of it and we must.
To conclude: last week Parliament also held a meeting hosted by Dagmar Roth-Behrendt at which the European Patient Forum outlined its manifesto. I am glad to see patients banging the drum, because it is patient input that we need. We are poised now to take a democratic decision, following the lead given by the lawyers. But the decision will now be taken by the right people, namely the elected representatives of the people."@en1
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