Towards an Integrated European Healthcare Space?

While health services have long been insulated from the process of European integration, this article shows that we are witnessing their re-configuration in an emerging EU healthcare space. The article uncovers the structuring lines of this space by focussing on three interrelated processes that contribute to linking national healthcare systems into a larger EU-level one: 1) indirect vertical pressures linked to the rise of a new capitalist accumulation regime and the constraints of both the Maastricht economic convergence and the EU accession criteria; 2) horizontal market pressures linked to the free movement of health services, workers and patients within the European Single Market; 3) direct political pressures linked to new EU laws and New Economic Governance prescriptions that the EU has been issuing since the financial crisis of 2008. The article shows that these processes have helped constructing a European healthcare space that is uneven in terms of the distribution of access to services by patients and of wages and working conditions of healthcare workers, but similar in terms of economic and financial governance pressures within and across EU member states.