One Greek in Nine Went Without Medical Care They Needed

Care needed and not received

Respondents are asked whether there was a time in the previous twelve months when they needed a medical examination or treatment and did not receive it, and if so why. This indicator counts three reasons: they could not afford it, it was too far to travel, or the waiting list was too long.

Reasons such as fear of the doctor or wanting to wait and see are excluded, which is what makes the measure one of access rather than of choice.

Across the EU in 2025, 2.4% reported an unmet need on those grounds.

Greece

Greece records 11.5%, more than four times the EU figure and roughly one person in nine.

Greece has held the Union's highest rate only since 2024: Estonia held it in every year from 2015 to 2023, with Greece second each time. The Greek rate itself was 6.4% in 2021 and has risen to 11.5% since.

It sits alongside everything else this site records about Greece: the second-lowest life satisfaction in the Union, behind Bulgaria, the highest housing cost overburden, the most negative external investment position. Greece is the Member State whose crisis is most visible across unrelated indicators, fifteen years after it began.

Finland, and why the ranking is not about money

Finland records 7.8% and Estonia 7.7%, second and third.

Finland is among the Union's wealthiest Member States, has universal health coverage and records the highest life satisfaction in the EU. It also has the third-lowest number of healthy life years, which the quality of life study on this site reports.

Finnish unmet need is a waiting time problem rather than an affordability one, and the survey says so directly once each total is split by the reason the respondent gave. Of Finland's 7.8 points, 7.3 are waiting lists and 0.4 is cost.

Greece is the mirror image on the same split: 8.8 of its 11.5 points are people who could not afford the care, and 2.0 are waiting lists. Access to non-urgent specialist care in Finland involves queues, and a respondent who waited too long and gave up is counted in the headline figure in exactly the same way as someone in Greece who could not pay.

That is the indicator's central ambiguity, and it means the ranking cannot be read as a ranking of health system funding. Three quite different failures — cost, distance and delay — are added together into one number.

The very low figures

Malta and Cyprus record 0.1%, Czechia 0.3%, the Netherlands 0.5% and Austria 0.9%.

Rates this low are worth treating carefully. A figure of 0.1% means roughly one respondent in a thousand, which is at the limit of what a household survey can measure reliably.

They also depend on expectations. Someone who does not expect to receive a particular treatment may not report it as an unmet need, so a population accustomed to limited provision can record a low rate. Self-reported access measures are affected by what people think they are entitled to, and that is not constant across the Union.