The lobby monitoring organisation Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) published a study on Wednesday 27 January which denounces the neo-liberal decisions that have been taken in recent years by the European Union in the field of healthcare and which explain the current difficulties in managing the Covid-19 pandemic.
CEO believes that the outsourcing and privatisation of healthcare, combined with various austerity policies, have significantly worsened the ability of EU Member States to deal effectively with the pandemic. The non-governmental organisation particularly denounces the commoditisation of health and long-term care, the pressure for public-private partnerships, and the cuts in public spending encouraged by the EU’s economic governance processes.
The Lobby Observatory believes that one of the reasons for this is the ‘European Semester’ budgetary process, the cycle of economic and budgetary policy coordination within the EU, which aims, among other things, to prevent excessive macroeconomic imbalances in the Member States. CEO says that the documents it has been able to access show that the inclusion of healthcare in the EU’s ‘economic governance’ recommendations was a priority for BusinessEurope, the organisation that defends the interests of large private companies, and that the European Commission consulted private healthcare providers when drafting its national reports on the ‘European Semester’.
According to CEO, this economic performance-based approach contributed to the commoditisation of the health and elderly care sectors with catastrophic effects during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in nursing homes.
CEO furthermore denounces the influence of the private health lobby, including theEuropean Union of Private Hospitals (UEHP). According to the Lobby Observatory, the UEHP is apparently taking advantage of the pandemic to demand more public money, including from EU stimulus funds, using the principle of a level playing field between public and private hospitals.
“CEO and other NGOs, such as the European Public Services Union (EPSU) and the European Network Against the Commercialisation and Privatisation of Health and Social Protection (the European Network), demand that the EU ignore the private sector lobbyists whispering in its ear and reverse course on the kind of economic governance that has accelerated healthcare liberalisation”, said Olivier Hoedeman, researcher at CEO.
Link to CEO’s report: https://bit.ly/2YhT8Td ] (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)