‘Health needs to remain a priority in the EU’, warns lead MEP

During the last mandate, the EU’s work on health policy took off with the COVID-19 pandemic and the European Health Data Space. Euronews spoke to the EPP’s coordinator for public health in the Parliament about the next challenges.

Health needs to remain a priority at the European level, the MEP who led on the European Health Data Space has told Euronews in an interview in which he flagged the need for common action to improve the early detection and prevention of diseases and development of new medicines.    
“Before the previous mandate, before the Europe Beating Cancer Plan and before COVID-19, healthcare was a marginal topic in the European institutions,” MEP Tomislav Sokol (Croatia/European Popular Party) said.    
He added that the pandemic and the shortages of medicines the EU has experienced in the last few years have shown that member states cannot resolve all healthcare issues alone. 
Sokol was the lead MEP on the European Health Data Space, which established a common European framework for sharing health data and negotiated on behalf of the EPP the revision of the bloc’s pharmaceutical legislation – a file that caused some controversy last year and is set to be one of the most complex topics in the next mandate.   
After the Commission’s proposal was presented in April 2023, the European Parliament agreed on its position a year later, in a final sprint from the chamber to secure a position before the European elections in June 2024.    
The Croatian MEP, however, added that the Council position is still very uncertain, and it remains unclear when it will be ready to start interinstitutional discussions.    
Some of the most controversial aspects to date have been the incentives for the development of new medicines proposed by the European Commission and the reduction of the regulatory protection periods.    
“We need to find a balance between facilitating research and development, and innovation of new medicines on the one side and facilitating full access for patients in the EU on the other,” he said.    
Besides the pending work from the previous mandate, there are also growing challenges the EU will have to address in the next five years, according to Sokol, who flags mental health as one such. The European Commission published a Communication on Mental Health in June 2023, and the European Parliament approved a non-binding resolution to bring mental health on par with physical fitness and tackle the stigma of those suffering from related conditions.    
Despite some work already being done, Sokol added that the EU “should have a much clearer and stronger approach.”   
From the EPP’s health committee coordinator also highlighted the need to develop a plan for cardiovascular diseases.     
“In a similar vein, as was decided with cancer – the number two killer in the EU – so with cardiovascular disease as the number one killer, a cardiovascular strategy should definitely be one of the priorities.”   
The EU’s Beating Cancer Plan was one of the flagship initiatives of the previous Commission, and, according to Sokol should act as a footprint that could be applied to other strategies.    
“The Cancer Plan was so important because it wasn’t a wish list, it contained concrete deadlines, benchmarks and measures. It also had concrete funding, which is very important,” he added.   
The Hungarian Presidency of the Council also put cardiovascular disease at the front of its agenda for the next six months, aiming to push for the creation of an EU-wide plan on cardiovascular health, with a particular focus on prevention and tackling inequalities.    
Adopted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU4Health programme was the first time the bloc allocated a budget earmarked for health – a landmark given health remains a competence firmly in the hands of member states.   
The €5.3bn allocation running from 2021 to 2027 is not likely to be repeated, however, according to the director-general of the Commission’s health service.   
“It’s impossible to do all the things that we want to do with the decreased budget so this should be one of the priorities,” said Sokol.    
The health community in Brussels has experienced the difficulties of living with fewer EU funds. In February, EU leaders decided to re-deploy €1bn from Europe’s health programme to fund part of the aid package for Ukraine.  
In the setting of the new Parliament, the role of public health and who should handle it was one of the divisive points among political groups.    
The EPP, Tomislav Sokol’s group and the largest in the chamber, proposed to create a committee dedicated to health, as distinct from an existing entity – within the broader environment committee – which deals with the environment, public health and food safety, under which health discussions were held in the last mandate.    
Sokol considers it “crucial” to have this separate committee, claiming that if remains in the broader body it will be squeezed by environmental protection, which has become one of the biggest policy areas of the European Union with an enormous amount of legislative work.   
The main detractors of this idea argue the need to maintain the so-called ‘One Health’ approach – the principle that human, animal and environmental health are inextricably linked – threatened by the split.      
“Since all policy areas are intertwined, for instance, energy, economy, environmental protection, all of this is also connected, intertwined. If you use this logic that everything is connected, then you can only have one enormous committee in the European Parliament,” argued Sokol.