Protecting the European medical tourist: A new challenge for the E.U. Law?

Abstract

Medical tourism is currently an emerging issue that will probably have to be tackled by the European Union law, as well as by the member states' internal legal systems in the near future (Pai 2007: 567). This issue has been treated for several years in the US scholarly papers, anticipating a discussion that we could have in Europe soon (Fabbrini 2011: 51, regarding medical tourism linked to access to services). That anticipation was due to certain features of the American health care system that make it clearly different from those of the EU countries. Essentially, I am talking about the lack of a socialized health care in the U.S. equivalent to the European standards, and the high level of prices in the American medical services market. Nowadays, however, there are some reasons to think that we could see a similar development of this question in Europe.