BUPA; A Healthy Case, in the Light of a Changing Constitutional Setting in Europe?

Voluntary Additional Health Insurance in the European Union: Free Market or Regulation?

“…The idea of setting up a risk equalisation scheme was that it should contribute to the attainment of the public interest objectives served by private insurance, which are open enrolment (anyone under the age of 65 must be accepted), lifetime cover, community rating and minimum benefits policy. 60 One aspect of the case which is important to be discussed for the purposes of this article is that the ECJ classified private medical insurance as an SGEI, even though only about 50 per cent of the Irish population was covered by this additional insurance when the case was filed. 61 The ECJ addressed this fact, and the requirement of universality which it itself had specified as a mandatory european Journal of health law 24 (2017) 591-613 characteristic of an SGEI, by stating that: 'The compulsory nature of the service and, accordingly, the existence of an SGEI mission [is] established if the service-provider is obliged to contract, on consistent conditions, without being able to reject the other contracting party.…”