mr president everybody agrees that health is one of the most precious values for our citizens yet as we all know under article one hundred and fifty-two of the amsterdam treaty health falls exclusively within the competence of the member states
this obvious antithesis is not just a strange peculiarity in eu law it is in practice highly obstructive to our endeavours to achieve optimal health goals within the eu and one wonders why this situation has been allowed to proceed unchanged for such a long time
the reason of course is a financial one
health care is very costly and improving it to the extent of achieving the desired equality across the eu would mean large increases in health costs for some eu member states
so we can all come to this parliament and criticise the shameful differences in life expectancy in infant mortality rates and cancer survival from rich to poor member states but most of us fail to point the blame where it should lie on the eu's inability to secure the provision of financial assistance to poorer members in order to help them catch up in terms of the level of health care and thus stop their governments from opposing the possibility of removing health from the sole province of national competence
this one could argue is a sad reflection on the fundamental values we uphold in the eu in practice whereby we accord greater importance in terms of competence to internal market rules for our businesses for example than to health care for our citizens
my position is that the time has come for an urgent change to article one hundred and fifty-two of the amsterdam treaty and this can only be achieved by a concerted effort by the council the commission and parliament
as parliamentarians we should do our utmost to bring about the required change
that having been said the most important aspect of health strategy in practical terms is of course disease prevention
everybody knows that smoking obesity alcohol drugs high sugar intake and a stressful unhealthy lifestyle in general are our health's greatest enemies but are we doing enough to free our citizens from these curses
not really
let us take smoking for example
how can we claim to be doing everything we can to prevent people from smoking when we still subsidise tobacco-growing in the eu we still allow tax-free cigarette sales on planes and ships travelling to and from the eu we still have a relatively low tax on tobacco considering the enormous health cost of cigarette smokers we still have indirect tobacco ads on our tv screens and we still have laws relating to smoking which have hardly been fully implemented in the eu
i do not have time to say much more about prevention but i think the main point of what i am saying is the need to change the competence rule relating to health
