Browsing by Subject "regulation"

Health related issues are largely regulated at EU Member State level, whereas areas such as internal market and competition fall mainly under the remit of European Union competence. This creates tension not only between legislation governing health and that concerning internal market but also between national and EU legislation. Here the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) plays a key role in developing case-law through its judgments, defining further interpretation both on European and national level. An example of a sector operating at the interphase between public health and internal market interests is community pharmacy, which was chosen as the focus area of the study. The aim of this master's thesis was, through the case-study example of the regulation of pharmacy establishment, ownership and distribution in EU Member States, to perform a documentary analysis on related CJEU judgments, focusing on statements present in them referring to public health and internal market, discussing potential impacts on the community pharmacy sector as well as relating the outcomes to the broader context of European health policy with reference to existing literature. The study material consisted of publicly available documentation related to four judgments (Case C-531/06, Joined Cases C-171/07 and C-172/07, Joined Cases C-570/07 and C-571/07 and Case C-367/12) that were made between the years 2009 and 2014, the first proceedings initiating in 2006. The prevalence and variety of statements related to public health were found to be much higher in the documents analysed compared to those relating to internal market. The most common argumentation present in the judgments was related to the statement that regulation of ownership of community pharmacies can be justified by public health reasons, deriving from the professionalism inherent to pharmacists as well as ensuring balance between public health and economic interests. This transmits a clear message of the importance of public health and indeed the Court has been perceived as a balancing force to the union's liberalisation agenda. Following this it seems unlikely that the interpretation for national regulation would change in the near future, meaning that Member States should be able to maintain community pharmacy regulation, to the extent that it is implemented in a consistent manner. However, there has been indication of other routes being used to push for the liberalisation agenda and therefore it continues being a part of the debate both at European and national level. The findings of this study support literature suggesting that spillover is taking place in relation to the Court of Justice and health. Furthermore, it has been clearly demonstrated that even though officially the EU has very limited competence (authority) in health, its influence on European health policy is in fact highly significant, taking place to a large extent via routes other than those officially assigned to it in relation to health in particular. Whether this is intentional or unintentional, it does not change the fact that health policy is being influenced. When it happens without explicit intention, the processes lose transparency and are driven by other, potentially competing agendas. Therefore it would be important to assess whether the decision making processes and other processes currently shaping the European healthcare policy are in line with what was originally intended and re-evaluate whether this dynamic is the preferred way to proceed in the future.