Legitimating Health Care Reforms across the EU: Government Narratives of Health Restructuring in England, France, Hungary and Ireland

Explaining the drivers of healthcare reforms against the background of the recent financial and debt crisis in Europe has proved particularly challenging. While the effects of the crisis on healthcare funding and provision seems inevitable, notably through a diffuse pressure to enforce fiscal discipline, it is difficult to detect a change in ideas and policies following the ‘fast burning’ and ‘slow burning’ phases of the crisis (Seabrooke and Tsingou 2016). All European countries have faced similar challenges in terms of ageing population, slow productivity gains, and reduced public resources over the past three decades. Insofar, healthcare systems had been going through a slow burning crisis long before the outbreak of the European debt crisis. Furthermore, the common pressure of austerity does not bring a convergence of welfare systems as its effects are strongly mediated by domestic politics (Hemerijck et al. 2013)