Gestor bibliográfico Crisis y Salud

The bailout deals for Ireland, Portugal, and Greece include startlingly detailed changes for their national health systems. Nick Fahy asks whether the tighter European rules proposed to save the euro will mean the EU steering national health systems across all of Europe? Health systems are a central area of national policy; even within the European Union, the primary responsibility of the EU’s member states for their own health systems is explicitly stated.1 However, one of the consequences of the current financial crisis has been that European countries are facing the kind of detailed international involvement in their health systems that has more normally been seen only in developing countries. As part of the international “bailouts” for Ireland and Greece in 2010, and for Portugal in 2011, these countries had to agree detailed economic adjustment programmes with the “troika” (the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank). These programmes include some strikingly detailed prescriptions for change in the health systems.