EU HEALTH POLICY: NEW CHALLENGES FOR OLD PROBLEMS
EU HEALTH POLICY: NEW CHALLENGES FOR OLD PROBLEMS

Summary/Abstract: The action of the EU in the context of health protection is devoid of any real autonomy. This depends first of all on the fact that traditionally the Member States retained exclusive competence in the matter and that this national competence, today shared with the EU, is constantly reaffirmed by primary law. This is why the EU’s response to the Covid 19 crisis was initially very limited. The EU was finally able to play a leading role in the management of the health crisis only when the Member States realized that it was necessary to act together against a pandemic which did not stop at national borders. In other words, the old problem of competence has been overcome by the will of the Member States, relying on the institutional balance defined by the treaties. Secondly, it seems clear that the policies of the EU relating to the protection of health are inevitably linked to the obligations relating to the internal market, since the imperatives of public health were taken into account from the outset for the sole purpose of allow Member States to limit the freedoms of the internal market. These two trends now intersect in the inclusion of health protection in the digital internal market, which updates the latency opposition between the protection of fundamental rights and the freedoms of the internal market, in particular in relation to the challenges posed by the processing of massive health data by means of artificial intelligence.

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