Health and Welfare

Upon joining the EU, Central and Eastern European countries attempted to replicate the Western welfare model, but very soon 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 will join 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 health care system.

Nine months after accession, the Stockholm Network and the Centre for the New Europe are co-hosting a major full-day conference entitled 'Does the West Know Best?' to examine whether the EU-15 can learn from some of the new member states’ more radical approaches to social and economic reform, such as flat taxation, the privatisation of social security and moves towards more market-oriented health systems.

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 health care 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.

Reference pricing – a system of fixed reimbursements for pharmaceuticals in which governments price a drug with reference to the cheapest drug in the same category -promises tremendous savings with no cost in terms of 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, all who choose to adopt reference pricing.

Public welfare often clashes with private reference - in policy on drugs, obesity and even parenting. Yet bad choices - in diet and lifestyle impose costs and inconvenience on our fellow citizens. So has the nanny state already gone too far or are we still scandalously neglectful of the common good?

The health consumer is already knocking on Europe’s door but how can European consumers move from a position of weakness to a position of strength? What are the lessons from other nations where consumers have been empowered? Johan Hjertqvist is a policy innovator with direct practical experience of shaping a consumer-focused healthcare reform in Sweden known as The Stockholm Revolution. He will talk about what is needed to make European healthcare truly consumer focused and will explain the thinking behind the creation of the Health Consumer Index, a practical tool for evaluating how consumers are met by their health systems and where progress still needs to be made.

Every industrialised country is wrestling with the challenges that technology, ageing and endless cost increases pose for their national health systems, and Canada is no exception. One of Canada’s most prominent health care reformers talks about these questions. How does Canada balance efficiency in healthcare with social solidarity? Are Canadians more satisfied with their healthcare arrangements than Europeans? What are the lessons for Belgium and for Europe as a whole? Is the traditional welfare state model sustainable in the 21st century?