From an article in The Guardian with the tongue in cheek title 10 diktats from Brussels that are ruining life in Britain
The author then lists ten ways in which he thinks the EU has improved our lives, ending with this:
10. The European health insurance card, available to all EU citizens, allows the holder access to state-provided healthcare under the same conditions and at the same cost as residents in all 28 member states of the EU as well as Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
The first commenter nearly makes a good point…
Other than the EHIC, all of those could have been achieved outside the EU. Try harder next time.
Wrong.
All of those could have been achieved independently of the EU. We can coat-tail on or sign up to the good ideas and ignore the bad ones. Which are the good ones and which are the bad ones, and which ones the UK government would have adopted are separate discussions.
But the commenter chooses as an example something which was clearly arranged at EEA level, which includes citizens of Norway, Iceland etc. The UK is free to arrange these reciprocal agreements with whomever it likes. Clearly, it saves a lot of faff if you can sign up to one single reciprocal agreement with a whole bloc of countries all in one go, but that's not an argument for the EU as such.
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