Main description:

Patient mobility across Europe is markedly increasing and new generations will actively ask to be treated by the health-care system that best meets their needs. At a political level, the EU issued the EU Directive no. 24/2011/CE of 9th March 2011 concerning the application of patients' rights in cross-border health care and has contributed to improving the level of freedom of choice for the European citizen, but it does not seem to have increased actual patient mobility across Europe. Freedom to choose is necessary to grant the people of Europe the same access to public-sector health-care services. The latter is a key instrument for an efficiently functioning "single market" ensuring real mobility within the EU.

The aim of this book is to study the current European health care market and discuss the hypothesis of a European right of citizenship with reference to health-care services. It examines patients' mobility from several perspectives: determinants of patient mobility, governance of cross-border mobility at EU level as concerns patients and health-care professionals, policy implications, and case studies. It is intended for health researchers, decision-makers and professionals concerned with health-care provision and patient mobility. The goal is to provide, through scientific and methodological rigor, new informative tools useful for the implementation of new policies in the health-care sector in order to implement effective health-care integration in the European Union.

Contents:

Patient choice, mobility and competition among health care providers.- Using Discrete Choice Experiments to understand preferences in health care.- Implications of the EU patients' rights directive in cross-border healthcare on the German sickness fund system.- The possible effects of health professional mobility on access to care for patients.- Patient choice and mobility in the UK Health System: Internal and external markets.- What drives patient mobility across Italian regions? Evidence from hospital discharge data.- The impact of federalism on the healthcare system in terms of efficiency, equity, and cost containment: the case of Switzerland.- Patients' mobility across borders: a welfare analysis.- Quality competition and uncertainty in a horizontally differentiated hospital market.- Cross border health care provision: who gains, who loses.