Healthcare and the Lisbon Strategy

Abstract

The health of a population is a key contributor to sustained economic and social development (WHO 2010). Along with public-health policies, effective healthcare systems are an important part of securing population health. So, when the European Union (EU) set itself a growth target in the 2000 Lisbon, we could have expected that healthcare would form a central platform of the Agenda. In fact, the pattern of the EU’s engagement with healthcare through the Lisbon Agenda has been patchy, and, when compared with other ‘social’ areas (in particular, employment), it has been severely under-developed and lacking political saliency. Nevertheless, the healthcare example reveals some evidence of Europeanisation taking place both within and, perhaps more importantly, alongside the Lisbon Agenda. Most interestingly, healthcare policy exemplifies an area where interactions between the ‘new’ governance promulgated by Lisbon and the ‘old’ law of the internal market (going beyond Bulmer’s comparison [Chapter 3 in this volume] of those two ‘governance architectures’ [Borrás and Radaelli 2011a]) could potentially combine to contribute to resolving the ‘constitutional’ legitimacy gap between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ in policy development of the EU.