Time for a paradigm change? Incorporating transnational processes into the analysis of the emerging European health-care system

Sabina Stan and Roland Erne
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Sabina Stan: 8818Dublin City University and University College Dublin, Ireland
Roland Erne: 8797University College Dublin, Ireland

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2021, vol. 27, issue 3, 289-302

Abstract: Health services have long been insulated from the process of European integration. In this article, however, we show that we are witnessing their re-configuration in an emerging EU health-care system. The article uncovers the structuring lines of this system by focusing on three interrelated EU-wide processes influencing the integration of national health-care systems into a larger whole. First, the privatisation of health-care services following the constraints of Maastricht economic convergence and the EU accession criteria; second, health-care worker and patient mobility arising from the free movement of workers and services within the European Single Market; and third, new EU laws and country-specific prescriptions on economic governance that the EU has been issuing following the 2008 financial crisis. The article shows that these processes have helped to construct a European health-care system that is uneven in terms of the distribution of patient access to services and of health-care workers’ wages and working conditions, but very similar in terms of EU economic and financial governance pressures on health care across EU Member States.

Keywords: Health systems; European integration; health care; privatisation; labour mobility; patient mobility; new economic governance; methodological nationalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:treure:v:27:y:2021:i:3:p:289-302

DOI: 10.1177/10242589211026815

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