Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-25-Speech-4-011"
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"en.20080925.4.4-011"2
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"Mr President, we all know that question on the doorstep: what does Europe do for me? Here is an answer: Europe is providing a new opportunity for patients. That is good news; we just have to make sure it works, and we will work together – the three institutions, and certainly within this Parliament – to make it work. But we are talking about court judgments. We are not talking about a blank sheet of paper, so we are not starting from afresh. We have to take into account those judgments.
But this is a measure for patients – not for services, that is for another day. It is patients who are at the centre of this – patients, not lawyers – and it is for all patients, not just for a few.
Those judgments, in laymen’s terms, are that, if you are facing undue delay for treatment, you have the right to go to another Member State, to have that treatment and have the bill sent back home, so long as the cost is comparable and so long as the treatment is normally available. That is straightforward. When I produced my patient mobility report in this Parliament, it was overwhelmingly accepted. Above all, we said, this must be a decision of politicians, and not of lawyers.
Mrs Bachelot-Narquin, to quote Jean Giraudoux, ‘No poet has ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.’
That is why we want politicians and not lawyers interpreting this. That is why we want legal certainty, so that everyone knows where they stand: governments, health services, patients, doctors. And it is why we must make it work for patients and for health services. It must be an opportunity and not a nightmare back home for health-service managers.
So we have questions. We have questions that the patient has the right to have answers to. Do I qualify? If I do, how do I proceed? What are the checks that I can carry out on where I might be going and who the doctor might be? What is the choice? What is the confidentiality requirement? And what happens if something goes wrong?
Those are all questions for which we must find the answer. And then there are issues we have to discuss among ourselves; some of them have been raised already.
Firstly, prior authorisation. My instinct is that, for in-patient hospital care, it is fair to have prior authorisation. The Court did not say that this was wrong in itself; it said it is wrong to refuse it under certain circumstances, so we need to look at that very carefully.
We also need to look at the issue of prescriptions. Yes, I understand that the home state must have the decision on what is prescribed, but if you are prescribed a course of drugs as part of your treatment in another Member State and you go back home and they say you cannot have the rest of that course, where does that leave the patient? That is the sort of question we have to answer.
Another issue is reimbursement. The patient does not want to have to go with a pocketful of cash. There must be a way of having the bill sent back home, I believe through a central clearing house."@en1
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