Health financing in the EU budget: Cross-border care, food safety and the Critical Medicines Act

Healthcare should take priority in EU budgets over armaments, over grants for political non-profits or over subsidies that are wasted or stolen. This is how I comment on the planned European budget at the EP health committee. Although I am not a Euro-federalist, I support some things in European cooperation, for example:

Cross-border care. If a Czech citizen has the nearest hospital "over the line" in Austria, Germany, Poland or Slovakia in the border region, there is no reason for an ambulance to take him an hour to a more distant Czech hospital, similarly for maternity hospitals and complicated births. If citizens travel freely around the EU for work, education or tourism, it makes sense that they should also be able to receive care there. For this, the portability of medical documentation, prescriptions, but also the rules of which health insurance company will pay must work. This coordination costs some money, but organizationally it makes sense and pays off.

Early warning against problems such as unhealthy foods, medicines or implants. If anywhere in the EU it is found that a product is dangerous or toxic, it is necessary to check it in time, to pass the information on to other countries and to protect patients or consumers (in my speech I mention the problem of toxins in infant formula, which is now widely publicized). This requires setting up and paying for a certain infrastructure, cooperating hygiene and inspections, which everyone swears by, but only until people suffer health damage because these "authorities" functioned poorly, slowly, or not at all, or "couldn't talk" to each other.

Stockpiles of critical medicines. From experience, see the lack of antibiotics in 2023 during the War, it is good to ensure that at least the most important medicines have a safety stock in the event of a disruption in global supply chains. Its maintenance is not safe to leave purely to the pharma business or distributors who are private corporations, this is the role of the public sector. The new "Critical Medicines Act", which I supported on the committee, is also about this, even about the "details", specifically who will manage the stockpiles, pay and distribute them in the event of a crisis, we still have to talk consistently at the Czech and European level, because now it would not work and we have some bitter experience here on how not to do it (see antivirals for covid).

All of this has a budgetary aspect, and as I say - let's put European money on healthcare, the citizens want and need it, rather than on other dubious Europrojects into which some colleagues want to pour trillions and cut health care because of it.

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