Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-15-Speech-3-142"
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"en.20001115.6.3-142"2
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"Mr President, I would like to offer warm thanks to Mr Rocard, and also to Mr Marinos, for their trail-blazing report, which is on the table today. The issue of health insurance has occupied European minds for quite some time now, but the Kohll and Decker decrees, in which the European Court of Justice determined that healthcare received overseas must be remunerated by insurers, has in fact added an extra dimension to this discussion.
Mr Rocard’s report, which we have here before us, will help to stimulate debate about the further development of social security in Europe, within the context of growing competition and the rise of the single market in healthcare. One of the main objectives of the current modernisation of social protection is guaranteed access to affordable health protection. It is particularly important for the affordability of health care to be taken into consideration, because the discussion about social security is determined not so much by the quality as by the cost of health care. With its Kohll and Decker decrees, the Court of Justice has sent a clear message to the EU Member States. We are really coming round to the idea of cross-border care and so market forces are becoming increasingly applicable to health care. Whether this will happen, to what extent and when, is still unclear. Research and experiments have shown that it will not open the floodgates to medical tourism. However, there can be no two ways about it; more and more people are going to seek health care overseas. It is therefore imperative that the citizens are our main concern in this process.
This issue has one or two implications for us, but it will also have an impact on the national systems. We are talking subsidiarity. National systems of health care, and even the supervision of health insurance, are regulated at national level, but that does not mean that we are not all dealing with the same problems. That is precisely why it is so important – and in fact this is far and away the most significant achievement of this report – for the Commission to produce a Green Paper on supplementary health insurance in the short term. In point of fact, we must ask the Commission whether it is in a position to do this, and if so, how long will it take? Because it is very important. The statistics available to us in this sphere are not comparable, despite our best efforts to this end, and so it is crucial that we have this Green Paper.
Apart from that, there is a great deal people want done in the health care sector. A significant number of these aspirations are at national level, but that does not mean that we should not compare notes. Hitherto, this has been somewhat taboo up to a certain point. The Kohll and Decker decree has made a breakthrough. I also think the Rocard report has made a breakthrough on that score, but it is very important for the Commission to take up the initiative now, and come to the table with an actual Green Paper. Once that is in place we will look at how we should take it forward."@en1
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