Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-23-Speech-4-050"
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"en.20090423.3.4-050"2
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"Minister, ladies and gentlemen, for some years I have been criticising the fact that the European Court of Justice determines the right of patients to the payment of expenditure abroad. The Court guarantees that citizens do not have to wait for authorisation from their health insurer and that they can go straight to a doctor when they need to and that they have a right to the reimbursement of at least the cost of treatment at home, as this should not be a barrier to the free movement of persons. This is in the Treaties but the socialists have been fighting against this right for five years. In the meantime governments have lost further cases with their citizens. We have heard hundreds of times from lobbyists about the risk of insurance companies collapsing. They are afraid that patients will travel to countries where they will not have to wait months or years for an operation like they do at home. Patients will therefore have to obtain prior authorisation from their health insurers before receiving costly treatment. However, both patients and doctors throughout the EU need a simple rule for when they must request authorisation. Therefore I do not support the proposal to create 27 definitions of specialised and costly care for this purpose. This is hypocrisy because it involves the level of costs that insurance companies would be willing to pay for the treatment of citizens abroad. So why not establish it directly in euros?
I have been promoting proposals to develop a system to improve the quality and safety of health care and to publish objective quality assessments of healthcare facilities. This involves national or international hospital accreditations. The compromise proposal may be more general but even so it provides an important stimulus for countries that still lack such systems. I trust that all hospitals will soon obtain voluntary national or European accreditation involving quality checks. Hospitals in the Czech Republic already have to do this. I also believe that the Commission should not designate but only coordinate the border regions as pilot areas where cross-border healthcare projects can be tested. I am sorry that socialists here are continuing to fight hypocritically and under false pretences against a clarification of patients’ rights in the EU."@en1
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