Europe: a Continent for Old Folks

Rosanna Tarricone interviews Paola Testori Coggi The European Commission oversees choices made by member countries in health policy. What is the Commission's position with respect to the role of health and health care systems for EU citizens in this moment of deep economic crisis?Health policy, understood as not only care but especially prevention, keeps citizens health and thus ensure a more productive working age population; a healthy resident costs the state less and produces more, thus contributing to economic growth. A modern and innovative health care system is a driver of economic growth. Let's look at the data. The health and social services sector employs 10% of the workforce. Of these, 75% are women, as opposed to 45% in the rest of the economy. 43% have a university diploma, as opposed to 25% for the average employee. R&D investment is 8% of health spending, which climbs to 16% if we restrict our attention to pharma and biotech, vs 3.3% in manufacturing industries. It is thus self-evident that the health industry employs highly skilled, mainly female, labor, and makes our countries innovative and competitive on the research side.
A healthy Europe is a rich Europe. But how to sustain investment as spending shrinks?8.3% of GDP is accounted for by health spending, which is bound to increase as population ages. It's urgent to innovate care systems and take health services out of hospitals: e-health, and access to innovative and high-performance medicaments and technologies are key elements to make spending sustainable in an aging Europe. Only 3% of national budgets go into prevention. But prevention is the most effective weapon to fight chronic diseases and keep hospitals empty.
Prevention, e-health and cost-effective technologies: this is the recipe. How can we make sure it is followed?In order to innovate health care systems, we have launched an innovation partnership for "Active and Healthy Ageing", which lies at the heart of the Commission's Europe 2020 strategy. The public sector, research and private industry must find a new way to work together to bring innovation to the market for health care. We will measure the impact of this partnership and we strive to be ambitious. We aim to increase by two years life expectancy by the end of the decade.
EU policies stay on paper, if there is no commitment on the part of member countries.After the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council (EPSCO) of June 2011, the Commission and member countries have started a period of reflection with the objective of identifying effective ways of investing in public health, in order to heed the European Council's recommendations of tending towards "modern, responsible and sustainable health care systems". We are thus working with member countries on four areas: emphasizing the role of health in the Europe 2020 strategy; identifying key factors for an effective use of structural funds for investment in health; finding adequate answers to address the evolving needs of an aging society; measuring the effectiveness of investments in health care. If we reduce health spending, disease and absenteeism will spread and hardly replaceable skilled workers will have to leave the labor market. This is not the way to go. We have to work together to spend better, not less.