To the good health of all Europeans! For a single European health agency.

Summary The Covid-19 crisis brought health to the forefront of public policy concerns and debates and highlighted the weaknesses of the European Union in preventing and managing a pandemic. The start of the vaccination campaign, despite its shortcomings, demonstrated the importance of a common policy for the block, allowing for de facto solidarity among member states through the allocation of vaccine supply based on respective national population sizes. In this note, we consider going further and pursuing a common European health policy. We propose that this policy be administered by a single European health agency with sufficient financial means to carry out its tasks. The Health4EU initiative, or health for all European citizens, that we are defending is not to create a European health policy that would replace national policies, but to add three complementary missions to these national policies. First, the agency would coordinate a policy of investment in human capital by facilitating the mobility of health care workers to enable them to follow or provide additional training in the field, thus helping to improve the match, in quality and quantity, between local health supply and demand. Second, the agency would ensure a strategic supply of medicines and equipment. It would give the EU a purchasing capacity, and therefore a negotiating capacity with health industrialists, which would allow it to exploit economies of scale. Finally, the agency would assist local authorities to improve their health and long-term care infrastructures, thus giving substance to a more ambitious European health policy that is concerned with reducing inequalities in access to care throughout Europe.