The attack on universal health coverage in Europe: Recession, austerity and unmet needs

More than 1.5 million extra people have unmet need for healthcare since the beginning of the economic crisis in Europe. The advent of the Great Recession has placed Europe’s health systems under severe pressure, with real terms cuts to funding in many countries. 1 Accounts in the peer-reviewed literature and popular media have catalogued examples of vulnerable groups and individuals unable to access necessary care. 2 Although there have been case-studies of Spain, Greece and other individual nations, 3 to our knowledge there has been no systematic attempt to quantify changes in unmet need for medical care across the European Union. Here, using data from the EU-wide Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), we quantify the increase in self-reported unmet need, a comparative measure of healthcare access defined as being unable to obtain care when people believed it to be medically necessary, in association with the Great Recession