Proposal for Union health card network undermined by legal complications

Date: 15/07/1999

By Simon Coss

FOR EU citizens who fall ill while in another member state, a visit to the doctor can often turn into a bureaucratic nightmare.

A reciprocal arrangement between the Union's 15 national health-care systems will usually ensure that intra-EU travellers are eventually reimbursed for any medical or prescription charges they incur while away from home.

But claiming the money back involves a hefty amount of form filling. It can also be difficult for a local doctor treating someone who has fallen ill abroad to get in touch with that person's regular physician back home. Even if contact is made, the two practitioners will often be unable to communicate with each other because of language barriers.

In a bid to get round these sorts of problems, the European Parliament has been calling for years for the introduction of a standardised EU electronic health card. This would include a computer chip containing an individual's medical history and health insurance details, and could be consulted by authorities in all Union member states.

Smart card technology is already widely used in many Union countries in industries such as banking, telecommunications and insurance, and MEPs argue that there are no technical reasons why it could not be deployed to create an EU-wide health card system.

But the European Commission, which would be responsible for drafting the rules needed to set up an EU smart card network, claims it would currently be impossible to introduce such a scheme for legal reasons.

The institution says that Union governments need to reach agreement on a whole range of issues concerning the mutual recognition of each other's health-care systems before it would even contemplate bringing forward a formal proposal to set up a health card network.

"Major legal, political and technical obstacles remain before the development of EU legislation in this area could be considered," it said in a statement last month.