Previous Amigos

Upon joining the EU, Central and Eastern European countries attempted to replicate the Western welfare model, but quickly found they could not sustain such a costly system. The impending crisis that the Western model would wreak on the new EU member states forced them to devise new models of spending and taxation.

Some countries, like Slovakia, have already implemented major reforms in areas such as healthcare, tax and social security with great success. Others, such as the Czech Republic are devising new and interesting proposals for successful healthcare systems and a more efficient welfare model.

Pavel Hrobon joined us to discuss the nature of the Eastern reforms and the prospect of these new proposals being implemented in ‘old’ Europe. Pavel is the co founder and chairman of the health think tank healthreform.cz, an organization whose aim is to prepare and support the implementation of a substantial overhaul of the Czech healthcare system.

The European social model is struggling to survive in the age of globalisation. Healthcare systems that siphon huge sums of money from the taxpayer are paying few dividends; pension systems that rely heavily on state subsidisation cannot cope with the ageing population, and government taxation to pay for the vast array of social services is failing to deliver. These are the views of Johnny Munkhammar.

Mark Leonard, whose recent book ‘Why Europe will run the 21st Century’ stands in stark contrast to Munkhammar’s vision. Leonard views Europe as a ‘revolutionary model for the future’ and states unambiguously that those who believe Europe to be weak and ineffectual are wrong.

The two battled it out at this event at the Hotel Amigo.

Governments all over the Western world are struggling to curb or control healthcare spending. More often than not, reform tends to concentrate on macroeconomic levers to reduce expenditure and occasionally takes forms which amount to downright rationing of health services.

Experience shows that opening the health market to choice will increase spending. The political challenge is how to take advantage of this growth potential.

Laurent Alexandre MD is a French health economist with a unique inside experience of the healthcare system, both as a surgeon and senior civil servant. He is the founding president and CEO of Medcost, a leading consultancy specializing in online management of health services.

Science is driven by curiosity. Would any attempt to put that under greater public scrutiny deaden scientific inquiry? Or must scientists now come to terms with the fears and priorities of society at large? And is public accountability a meaningful concept in science? Scientists may not know what they are going to discover when they start experimenting or to what use it may ultimately be put. Are the public qualified to determine the priorities of scientific research? Is that untrammelled freedom for science out of date and dangerous?

Reference pricing is a system of fixed reimbursements for pharmaceuticals in which governments price a drug with reference to the cheapest drug in the same category. It promises tremendous savings without affecting the quality of healthcare. The reality, however, may be quite different. Critics argue that reference pricing treats patients as homogenous beings, that it leads to no real saving, and that it discourages investment in new therapies.

With the Belgian government debating whether to adopt the Kiwi version of reference pricing, John Graham, former director of Health and Pharmaceutical Policy at the Canadian think tank, the Fraser Institute, and author of The Fantasy of Reference Pricing, and Yolande Avontroodt, a prominent Belgian MP and member of the Committee on Public Health, addressed the key issues of reference pricing – what it is, what it will mean for Belgians and, indeed, for all countries which choose to adopt reference pricing.