Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-11-Speech-4-029"
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".
Mr President, I would like to thank Mrs Jöns and her colleagues for the excellent report they have presented to us containing a significant number of proposals and recommendations which deserve the Commission's full attention.
The Commission has also carefully examined the conclusions of the process of high-level reflection on the mobility of patients and will shortly present a communication on its monitoring.
Your report, Mrs Jöns, deals with a wide range of issues relating to social protection, public health, the free movement of people and services within the internal market. They are all important instruments for defining a global policy within the framework of our internal market competences in relation to free movement within the public health programme and the open coordination method applied to these issues. The Commission must pay special attention to these different instruments so that they are coherent and consistent amongst themselves. The fact that they are all of differing legal natures does not mean that we do not have to maintain complete consistency between all of them and the Commission will spare no effort in order to progress in this direction.
We will always remember – and this is an essential point – that primary responsibility on these issues falls to the Member States, particularly in relation to health and care for the chronically ill. Our work on the specific points is to support the work carried out by our Member States as much as possible.
Thank you very much for your contributions, which will undoubtedly be extremely useful to the Commission.
Mrs Jöns, we particularly value your report’s support for the application of the open coordination method in order to improve health care for the elderly in the countries of the Union.
The Commission intends shortly to adopt a communication with a proposal to apply this open coordination method in relation to health care issues. We will base this on previous experience because we believe it is essential to provide assistance in this area, which is key both in order to confront the problems of demographic ageing in our countries and in order to maintain high and appropriate levels of social protection.
The first condition for implementing this open coordination method is that the Member States adopt a series of common objectives which allow us to establish a useful framework for the process of reforming issues relating to health.
In accordance with the conclusions of the joint report presented last year to the spring European Council, we will focus on three areas: health care, accessibility and quality and financial viability.
We will also have to consider the second aspect which you have referred to: monitoring. Monitoring which must be carried out by means of appropriate comparable indicators. Without such indicators it is very difficult to assess the application of the different measures by the different Member States and to see whether this learning process, which we are undergoing jointly, is achieving the intended objectives.
We are also going to produce detailed working proposals up until 2006, when we hope to begin a new simplified process for coordinating policies which deals with health care, pensions and social inclusion. If we want to establish this working plan, it is essential to exploit synergies, the inter-relationships in the current public health strategy and the Community action plan which is linked to it.
In order to achieve the best results, it is essential that indicators receive strong support from this working programme. Otherwise we will not have the necessary references to understand the situation of each country.
We hope that the Council will debate the Commission's proposals during this year and we believe that, in this regard, the report you are presenting to us today is extremely timely and useful, and will make a fundamental contribution to this debate."@en1
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