Policy Makers', NGO, and Healthcare Workers' Accounts of Migrants' and Refugees' Healthcare Access Across Europe : Human Rights and Citizenship Based Claims

Freely available healthcare, universally accessible to the population of citizens, is a keyideal for European welfare systems. As labor migration of the twentieth century gave wayto the globalized streams of the twenty-first century, new challenges to fulfilling theseideals have emerged. The principle of freedom of movement, together with large-scaleforced migration have led to large scale movements of people, making new demandson European healthcare systems which had previously been largely focused on meetingsedentary local populations’ needs. Drawing on interviewswith service providers workingfor NGOs and public healthcare systems and with policy makers across 10 Europeancountries, this paper considers how forced migrants’ healthcare needs are addressedby national health systems, with factors hindering access at organizational and individuallevel in particular focus. The ways in which refugees’ and migrants’ healthcare accessis prevented are considered in terms of claims based on citizenship and on the humanright to health and healthcare. Where claims based on citizenship are denied and thereis no means of asserting the human right to health, migrants are caught in a new formof inequality