ABSTRACT
Freely available healthcare, universally accessible to citizens, is a European welfare ideal. Large-scale movements of migrants place new demands on European healthcare systems which developed to meet sedentary local populations’ needs. Drawing on interviews with service providers working for NGOs and public healthcare systems and with policy makers across ten European countries, this chapter considers how forced migrants’ healthcare needs are addressed by national health systems, focusing on factors hindering access at organisational and individual level. The ways in which refugees’ and migrants’ healthcare access is prevented are considered in terms of claims based on citizenship and on the human right to health and healthcare. Where claims based on citizenship are denied, there is no means of asserting the human right to health, and so migrants are caught in a new form of inequality.
