Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-23-Speech-4-018"
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"en.20090423.3.4-018"2
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".
Mr President, first of all, I would like, on behalf of my group, to wish Mr Bowis a speedy recovery. I know that he was working hard in the committee until the last day of the vote, and I hope, now, that he recuperates after his operation and gets well soon and that we will be seeing him here again before the summer recess.
Allow me to start by saying that my group thinks this is a very good report. We can see that the Commission’s proposal has been thoroughly improved by numerous amendments from the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety and by compromises that we reached together. Commissioner Vassiliou, you and your team produced good work, but there was scope for improvement, and we have succeeded in improving it.
We have managed to ensure that all patients will now know that they have rights in the European Union just like everyone else does. They can move around, just as is self-evident for every worker, every student and for goods, services and other things. Patients, too, are to have their rights in the internal market. That is what this legislation lays down, and for that reason we welcome it unreservedly.
We must also point out, however, which areas of the report we particularly approved of. These include, for example, the fact that patients are to be granted free movement for non-hospital care. We also think, however, that the Member States should retain the competence for their healthcare systems. They should be able to plan for their hospital care, their specialist care, and their investments in the Member State in question should be affordable. We do not seek to take away this authority, this competence, from the Member States. Nor do we want them to be bled dry. It is therefore right for there to be prior authorisation for certain kinds of treatment. This, too, is something that my group is very happy to give its full backing to, and I will return to this issue at the end. This is a good approach, which is something that characterises the report as a whole.
One thing that I very much welcome, on a personal level, is the fact that there are to be reference networks at long last. How long have we been demanding that it must be clear where in the European Union best practice is taking place? Where are treatments being performed best? Where are they being most successful? Which team in which hospital in which Member State has news to report? At the moment, this is left to chance. Perhaps a small part of the scientific community knows about it, but not every local doctor. The fact that we are able to improve this situation through the advent of reference networks is a great achievement. These sources of information will enable every patient in every Member State to drop in or call up and ask, ‘What are my rights?’ They will be told in their own language what their rights are and, where they have a problem, they will get an answer. This is a positive development.
As I reach the end of my speaking time, I must also mention those areas that the majority of my group find regrettable. For the vast majority of my group, this involves two items that are critical for us and for our voting behaviour today. The first of these is that we want to see a dual legal basis. We need to use the health article, Article 152, in order to ensure that the message that we are sending out to the world is that this is an issue of health policy as well as of freedom of movement. We need this, and it is a condition of our support.
Furthermore, we are convinced that prior authorisation, as set out in Article 8(3), is inadequately defined. If we are unable to obtain an improvement in this through the amendments that have been tabled, my group will not, unfortunately, be able to bring itself to vote through this report, which is something that I personally regret, although perhaps this will act as a spur to do better at second reading if we do not make enough ground today."@en1
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