Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
Stan, S. and Erne, R.
International Sociological Association (ISA) 2018 Conference
Migration, access to health and EU governance
Toronto, Canada
Oral Presentation
2018
()
Optional Fields
15-JUL-18
21-JUL-18
The paper argues that European governance has importantly impacted on intra-European migrants’ rights to access health. More specifically, on the one side, EU’s traditional horizontal integration through the building of the single market has led to the development of European citizenship based on residence rather than ethnicity (Kostapoulos). This has the potential to enhance intra-European migrants rights to access healthcare across the EU. However, on the other side, the same single market integration has been accompanied by the diffusion of a neoliberal model of care where private actors and interests were given an increasingly important role. This has led to privatisation becoming an important process affecting EU member states’ health services. Moreover, following the 2008 crisis, the EU’s new economic governance has increased the financial strain on a series of healthcare systems across the EU and has been accompanied by the acceleration rather than slow down of healthcare privatisation. In its turn, healthcare privatisation has led to both labour force segmentation among healthcare workers, and inequalities of access to services among patients, processes that have also fuelled increased healthcare worker and patient mobility inside the EU. In the other direction, these mobilities have fed into the privatisation of health services, leading to a perverse cycle that deepens the unevenness of the rising transnational European healthcare space.