The main concept of the research has been to take a look beyond the words of the legislation, to make the patients the centre of interest and to bring a better understanding of the (potential) problems patients face when obtaining healthcare abroad. In searching for the answer as to whether free movement of patients exists in the European Union, the research led to the conclusion that the desired ‘borderless Europe ’ is yet far away for European patients and despite its benefits, the long-awaited Patient Mobility Directive (PMD) did not bring much change in this regard.

One might wonder why it is so difficult to tackle the problems of crossborder healthcare, when it involves a comparatively limited number of patients and healthcare expenditure. In my opinion, the main reason is that the field of healthcare is a multi-player arena where many different interests (of patients, healthcare providers, healthcare funds, national governments, Union institutions, etc), different competences (basically of the Member States and various EU institutions, but also within the Member States where competences are often allocated at different levels, e.g. federal, regional, local) and different ideologies collide. This creates a tense political atmosphere in which patients’ well-being, which is supposed to be the starting point and the main aim of any health-related arguments, runs the risk of evaporating in the process. This might – at least partly – explain why, after almost sixty years of healthcare coordination and almost two decades since the ground-breaking judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU),European patients are still left with restricted cross-border mobility rights and impediments to free movement both from legal and non-legal points of view.

In the former sections of this book I focused on the individual problems accompanying cross-border patient movements within the European Union and suggested some possible solutions to tackle them.