Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-07-09-Speech-1-106"
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"en.20070709.16.1-106"2
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"The role and responsibility of the EU within the health sphere is, and must remain, limited. Perhaps the most important contribution to be made by the EU, however, is to enable people to seek health care in other EU countries. For many who are ill, health care in another EU country may be a matter of life or death. It is therefore incomprehensible that so many Member States do everything they can to limit that very option. European health care consumers should have access to the whole range of European health care, but that means having knowledge and information, and, where these are concerned, the health programme could play an invaluable role in disseminating information about health and health care to all patients throughout Europe.
I and many like me therefore think how unfortunate it is that, in many respects, precisely this area appears to have been curtailed when, for budgetary reasons, the Commission revised its proposal for a new health programme. I understand, however, that there has been a very great deal of opposition to this happening. Why, in actual fact, is increasing the transparency between different health care systems in the Member States such a delicate issue, however? Why not focus on measuring the likely results in terms of health care and of how many people would actually be helped to get better, rather than focus on available resources such as beds and days spent in hospital? The only explanation I can see is that there is a desire to keep patients uninformed and powerless.
It is equally incomprehensible that the EU Member States’ compromise with our rapporteur, Mr Trakatellis, should have called, for example, for the removal of the wordings I included precisely in order to give patients more power. Why, for example, is there no desire to confirm that patients have rights also in their capacity as health care consumers? They have deleted the sentence whose meaning was precisely to that effect. I find that embarrassing.
In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, health decisions must be made at the lowest possible level. For me, that means at patient level, irrespective of what is said by politicians and bureaucrats in the Member States. We must therefore use European cooperation to strengthen the position of patients and give them more knowledge and more power. In a nutshell, patients should be allowed to take control of their own illnesses."@en1
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