International

I will be continuing my weekly blogs during the next few weeks, but with the European Parliament in recess, these will appear rather different to the normal run. The next five weekly blogs will be devoted to the book by the father and son team of Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky, How Much is Enough? The book is a direct attack on the way in which we bound ahead towards ever more economic growth, without this leading to more wellbeing. The  Skidelskys define seven basic goods, necessities which we really must have. In each of these weekly blogs I will go into one or more of these basic goods and discuss what the implications of European Union policies are for each of these. Another world is possible, in Europe, too.

The first basic good, according to the Skidelskys,  is ‘Health’. They point out that health care under pressure from neoliberalism has changed in nature from making people healthy to the conscious creation of health care needs. Not for nothing is the patient now seen as the ‘customer’. The pharmaceutical industry is out to sell as many medical products as possible, in order to make (even more) profit. Who has not been subject to ever more aggressive calls for a ‘bodyscan’? Without such a scan your body might be a ticking time bomb. And they do indeed always find something, with the result that after the scan you will be sure to feel insecure about your health. Many doctors in the mainstream also warn against these sort of scans, which lead to unnecessary disquiet and often to unnecessary treatments.

These kinds of unnecessary health care products are only available to the better off, because they don’t come cheap. In relation to health care, it’s more important that when you truly need something, it’s available to all. And this is precisely what years of cuts and the introduction of a sort of marketisation, under which the hospital has become a business with shareholders, has in rapid tempo demolished what was built in the years before these began.  Health care is becoming unavailable to people on low incomes.

On a formal level the European Union has no say over health care, but how does this explain the fact that one of the biggest lobby groups in Brussels belongs to the pharmaceutical industry? Amongst other reasons, this is down to the fact that the European Medicine Agency determines which medicines member states may approve. This agency has been in a terrible muddle for years and continues to be  characterised by conflicts of interest. In the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee this will be one of my targets over the next few years. In addition, pressure from Brussels to bring as many public services as possible on to the market is strong, and the pharmaceutical industry is naturally a major supporter of such policies. The more market, the more profit. At the same time in the framework of Economic Governance ‘Super Commissioner’ Olli Rehn makes all sorts of proposals regarding spending cuts in health care.  This makes him one of the guilty parties in relation to the unaffordability of good health care for all.

The European Union is working in this respect towards the marketisation of health care and the demolition of everything which we had arranged in order to ensure that people who need health care get health care. A patient is not a consumer, but in Brussels they see things differently. The creation of a European market for health care is good for big corporations, so it’s a fine thing to bring unnecessary health products and services, even via advertising, direct to the ‘consumer’, while truly necessary health care, the basic good, is ever less affordable. We must turn things around, so that Brussels will have to recognise that health care is first and foremost a public service. Member states must have the space to run health care as they wish, because national governments are responsible for public services and the European Union plays no significant role in relation to this. If Brussels wants to stick its oar in somewhere, it should attempt to arrive at a total ban on advertising of health care products and services, including hospitals, and all sorts of pseudomedical health care products where advertising works merely to worry people, creating demands which certainly don’t make us happier. Get rid of the market in health care and reject the recommendations of the ‘Super-Commissioners’: in the Netherlands we want to be able to work without interference on the provision of an affordable basic good known as health care.