International

The SP's Euro-MPs have declared their complete opposition to EU-directed market-testing in health care. In the guise of furthering patient mobility, pressure is coming from a range of EU bodies to force health care to come under the rules of the internal market in services.

SP Euro-MP Kartika Liotard, a member of the European Parliament's Committee on Public Health and the Environment, will speak out in today's plenary session against attempts to force market testing on to the health care sector through the back door. “I was myself the author of the amendments which were carried by the European Parliament when it decided to exclude health care from the Directive on Services in the Internal Market,” Ms Liotard said. “It would be totally unacceptable if the genuine problem of cross-border patient mobility were misused in order to undermine the parliament's ruling. Patient mobility and the free movement of commercial health care services are much too often compounded, when in reality the former is a right and the latter a threat to national health systems.”

Liotard will react to a written question from the centre-right EPP group, in which the Commission is requested to introduce measures at Community level related to health care. In the Committee on Public Health and the Environment, she is spokeswoman on the issue for the United Left Group (GUE/NGL), in which the SP participates.