The attack on universal health coverage in Europe: different effects in different parts of Europe.

Abstract

Access to health care is an important social determinant of health,1 often taken for granted in European countries, where most people have access to universal health coverage either in tax-funded or social insurance health care systems. However, as emphasized by Reeves et al. in this journal,2 the Great Recession has put pressure also on European health systems. Their finding that the proportion in the population reporting an unmet need of health care has increased with the onset of the recession, and furthermore that the recession offset a previous trend of declining unmet need of health care, is worrying from a public health perspective. The increase in the proportion reporting unmet need of health care occurs differentially, in the study a 6-fold increase was reported among the poorest groups compared with the highest …