DIRECTIVE ON PATIENTS’ RIGHTS IN CROSS-BORDER HEALTHCARE:

A CRUCIAL ACHIEVEMENT FOR EUROPEAN CITIZENS.

Both citizens and associations waited quite a lot for this Directive, which makes easier moving across the EU member states in order to obtain the health care services needed. Great part of the Directive contents derive from comparisons and dialogues between the European Commission for Health and consumer policies,

the European Parliament and citizens' associations, including ACN, which fought to obtain the Charter of Patients’ Rights as part of the Directive. The fact that the Directive title contains the words patients' “rights” demonstrates that this normative highlights the relation between citizens/patients and health care systems.
The Directive simplifies and tries to standardize procedures for requesting health care services, drugs and medical devices provided in another member state. The reception of this 2011 Directive opened the market frontiers of health care services and devices, produced a greater possibility of choice and empowered EU citizens’ right to access health all around Europe. Cross-border health care now exists, but procedures differ among member states. Therefore, the provision of standardized and homogeneous procedures represents a significant step in the process of integrating the health care systems of member states.
As concerning the 14 rights of the European Charter of Patients’ Rights, the right to access, the right of information and the right of innovation, privacy and compensation have been absorbed by the Directive. It will be necessary, however, to understand how the latter will be implemented by member states, and above all, how things will be led by national judicial systems:

• it will be necessary to understand how limitations will be absorbed to the free request for care abroad through prior authorization (article 8) for those services requiring the use of very expensive or highly specialized equipment;
• reimbursement limits in reference to health insurance; in this case, it will eventually be necessary to explicate the benefits that health insurance provides to those who are coming from a universal health system; 
• limits to be evoked regarding the risk of compromising the economic and financial equilibrium of the state welfare model to which the patient belongs, and which must ensure the reimbursement of care.

In order to avoid the risk of a member state invoking these limitations over very generic issues, thereby thwarting the freedom of patients to request external care, the determined work of citizens' associations is necessary for spreading information about innovative contents of the Directive, for the role that these could play relating to the "national contact points" provided for, in order to orient citizens’ and patients’ assistance in case of controversy or contention.

It is important to underline that this Directive, recognizing certain rights and eliminating barriers, will oblige every state to do its best to ensure those rights and possibilities within their own territory, in order to avoid excessive expenses and debt, against the objection that some individuals, above all from the world of patients' associations, have made about the need to privilege service. Moreover,  the recognition of some rights represents a precedent that is placed in citizens' associations who, with the Directive as backing, can then muster the courage to claim their receipt in their state of residence.

Directive2011/24/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 9 March 2011 on the application of Patients’ rights on cross boarder health care