engleski

Standard of Care, Health Insurance, and European Union: A Path Towards Harmonisation?

Regulation of health care belongs primarily to the competences of EU Member States. Apart from specific areas like regulation of medicines, powers of the EU to adopt legally binding rules are mostly limited to coordination and support of national activities in the field. A similar statement can be made concerning social health insurance (packages): both regulation and financing of the system and standard of care within the Union belongs to the Member States’ competences. Still, application of EU internal market rules facilitating cross-border health care, resulting in coming into force of Directive 2011/24 on the application of patients’ rights in cross-border healthcare, has raised questions on possible reshaping of this division of powers between the Union institutions and the Member States. The aim of the presentation is to investigate EU legal framework and see whether the evolution of this framework in recent years may give rise to some degree of harmonisation of national health insurance packages and standard of care within the Union. Standard of care in this context in understood as the entitlement to best possible health care financially affordable to a patient. The presentation first explains the division of competences between the EU and Member States concerning health care (insurance) mainly focusing on EU primary law, along with main concepts like standard of care, social health insurance package and harmonisation. This is followed by a short description of EU legal developments in the area of cross-border health care. Next, legal possibilities of harmonisation of national health insurance packages through Union legal instruments concerning cross-border health care are presented. Finally, it is submitted, on the basis of the previous analysis and some national examples, that EU legal instruments may help bring about some degree of harmonisation of national health insurance packages and standards of health care provided throughout the Union.

harmonizacija, zdravstveno osiguranje, Europska unija

nije evidentirano