Health care and the EU: the law and policy patchwork

摘要: Governments of European welfare states face an uncomfortable predicament. To transfer their welfare-state obligations to the EU level would jeopardize the political basis of their legitimacy. However, since at least the mid-1980s, the processes of European integration, to which those governments are irreversibly committed, have become increasingly pervasive. 1 As a result, European integration creates a problem-solving gap in that ‘member governments have lost more control over national welfare policies, in the face of the pressures of integrated markets, than the EU has gained de facto in transferred authority’, 2 substantial though the latter may be.