Healthcare report receives cool reception

Having read the summary and key findings of the report, the chief executive of the European Hospital and Healthcare Federation (HOPE), Pascal Garel, said he was "anxious" to read the rest of the report and looked forward to reading where the authors found basis for their recommendations. "We were never consulted or asked to contribute to this study," he said. He also finds it "too black and white" to say that there's no data on how the healthcare money is used. "We have more and more comparable criteria and data on hospital care. We are aware of what we produce," he added. 

The European Consumers' Organisation BEUC is surprised that the report was presented to the commissioner with responsibility for industrial policy and not health. "This may reflect the unfortunate fact that the Commission treats medicines largely as industrial products, by assigning to DG Enterprise the lead role on medicines policy in the EU." 

"Currently, in many countries, the healthcare services purchaser and provider are one and same entity, such as a commune. This leads to non-transparency on how the healthcare money is finally used. The orderer and provider of healthcare should be separated in order to bring processes and prices into daylight," explained Laura Niemi from Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund.

"Healthcare is currently extremely non-transparent. We don't have the slightest idea of its prices, nor the products. We need to start doing some serious cost and expenditure analysis on what the money is spent, what kind of patients are cared for, whether the patients are cured, what the results are, and so on. A price-based mechanism in financing healthcare would mean that we know all this. Once we know the prices and products, we can start to explore the power of the market with regard to the provision of healthcare," said Hannu Hanhijärvi, from Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund.

Claude Hemmer, chief advisor to the Luxembourg health minister said that in today's Europe, bringing innovations to patients takes too long. "Europe needs to mobilise innovation more openly, systematically and transparently. Constant and ongoing evaluation and reappraisal are critical to assessing the value of new technologies in healthcare – decisions about innovations can be cast in stone far too early and sometimes for much too long."