Regulating private health insurance in the European Union: the implications of single market legislation and competition policy

This paper examines the implications of the single market in insurance for regulation of private health insurance in the European Union. It considers areas of uncertainty in interpreting the third non-life insurance directive, particularly with regard to when and how governments may regulate private health insurance, and questions the Directive’s capacity to promote consumer and social protection in health insurance markets. The Directive reflects the regulatory norms of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when boundaries between ‘social security’ and ‘normal economic activity’ were still relatively well defined in most member states. Today these boundaries are increasingly blurred, and as governments look to private health insurance to ease pressure on public budgets, uncertainty about the scope of the Directive and concerns about its restrictions on material regulation are likely to grow.