A report on the BBC News website suggests that the European Commission have today delayed their report dealing with medical tourism between EU states for "agenda reasons".
The delay should come as no surprise though as there have been strong rumours of discontent amongst the various EU health ministers about the effects of the report, particularly to do with added strain on their own health systems from inward patients and on their health budgets from unexpected outward patients.
It seems now as if each country will be able to run a system to pre-approve each patient’s right to having their treatment costs covered, which in effect changes very little from how things stand today apart from standardising the system slightly.
If the European Commission does manage to stand their ground in the face of this opposition, they will in effect create a pan-European healthcare system, where patients will be in control of spending the money allocated for their treatment by their local health system, a fairly revolutionary idea.
