Health Care and Migration. What Data Can Tell Us of the Hard-Measured Impact of Migrants on the European Health Systems?

Nowadays migration is one of the central issues in the international as well as in the European political and public debate, representing a key challenge for the modern societies. Together with the adaptation of welfare systems, it has been extensively investigated in social sciences but one of the most compelling challenges consists in the adaptation of the health systems to migration’s new needs. The European Union (EU) presents among its Member States (MSs) highly differentiated situations in terms of healthcare provision models, contribution systems and integration policies adopted towards foreigners. This becomes even clearer having a look to the relationship between the Migration Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), carried out by the Migration Policy Group in 2015, and the data extracted from the 2014 Eurobarometer. Based on this data, our work, starts from the traditional types of healthcare systems to analyse the economic and financial peculiarities of health systems in adapting to the migratory care demand and the migrants’ contribution to the European systems, bringing the empirical evidence of some case studies (Germany, Italy, UK and Spain in the EU vs. USA, Canada).