Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-09-Speech-4-045"
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"en.20081009.4.4-045"2
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"Mr President, everybody agrees that health is one of the most precious values for our citizens, yet, as we all know, under Article 152 of the Amsterdam Treaty, health falls exclusively within the competence of the Member States. This obvious antithesis is not just a strange peculiarity in EU law; it is, in practice, highly obstructive to our endeavours to achieve optimal health goals within the EU, and one wonders why this situation has been allowed to proceed unchanged for such a long time. The reason, of course, is a financial one. Health care is very costly, and improving it to the extent of achieving the desired equality across the EU would mean large increases in health costs for some EU Member States.
So we can all come to this Parliament and criticise the shameful differences in life expectancy, in infant mortality rates and cancer survival from rich to poor Member States, but most of us fail to point the blame where it should lie, on the EU’s inability to secure the provision of financial assistance to poorer members in order to help them catch up in terms of the level of health care, and thus stop their governments from opposing the possibility of removing health from the sole province of national competence.
This, one could argue, is a sad reflection on the fundamental values we uphold in the EU in practice, whereby we accord greater importance in terms of competence to internal market rules for our businesses, for example, than to health care for our citizens.
My position is that the time has come for an urgent change to Article 152 of the Amsterdam Treaty and this can only be achieved by a concerted effort by the Council, the Commission and Parliament.
As parliamentarians, we should do our utmost to bring about the required change. That having been said, the most important aspect of health strategy in practical terms is, of course, disease prevention. Everybody knows that smoking, obesity, alcohol, drugs, high sugar intake and a stressful, unhealthy lifestyle in general are our health’s greatest enemies, but are we doing enough to free our citizens from these curses? Not really.
Let us take smoking, for example. How can we claim to be doing everything we can to prevent people from smoking when we still subsidise tobacco-growing in the EU, we still allow tax-free cigarette sales on planes and ships travelling to and from the EU, we still have a relatively low tax on tobacco considering the enormous health cost of cigarette smokers, we still have indirect tobacco ads on our TV screens, and we still have laws relating to smoking which have hardly been fully implemented in the EU?
I do not have time to say much more about prevention, but I think the main point of what I am saying is the need to change the competence rule relating to health."@en1
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