Improving health care systems by building ‘more Europe’

Excerpt

Health results from a combination of different factors, but society tends to believe that health care systems have the highest responsibility to provide the inputs needed to increase quality of life and survival, the two major variables that allow us to quantify such an abstract and multifactorial concept as health. Health care systems require human resources, scientific knowledge and technologies to yield the expected output. A system is, by definition, a set of organized elements that interact among themselves to achieve a given target. But, so far, the context within which the interaction of the elements of health care systems has taken place has been national (or in some cases regional), rather than supranational. And that is the crucial issue we would like to address in this text. …