Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-25-Speech-4-020"
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"en.20080925.4.4-020"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, four out of every hundred citizens in Europe go abroad for treatment; in my view, however, health tourism is symptomatic of local shortcomings and a lack of services. The Italian health service spends some EUR 40 million a year on Italians who go for treatment in other countries, and that obviously does not include private insurance.
What are the reasons for this? Without a doubt the very long waiting lists for services. In Italy, for instance, people have to wait 300 days for a prostate operation and very often a month or more for a CAT scan. Secondly, services such as dental treatment and cosmetic surgery have to be paid for in Italy and not in other countries. Thirdly – and I draw everyone’s attention to this – people go abroad to take advantage of techniques such as artificial fertilisation which are prohibited or partly prohibited in their own countries, or which are absolutely illegal as in the case of purchase of live organs – while India is a sad example, there may well have been equally sad examples in other countries before their accession to the Union.
All in all, people decide to embark on health tourism because high-quality and less expensive services are on offer; in many cases, however, I feel that supervision by the Union needs to be tightened up both as a guarantee for consumers and to ensure that competition is on an equal footing. The social context in which services are provided is often a mixture of public and private, in those countries which have recently acceded as well, and, Mrs Vassiliou, I would therefore recommend, over and above the principles on which you have focused, strict supervision of compliance with existing regulations which make the use of raw materials, the CE mark and conformity documents compulsory, because the salubriousness of medical devices and treatments has to be guaranteed. Let us not forget that there is always someone …"@en1
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