Yes and as long as you dont change it one bit you'll likely be able to keep it, but change anything (like leaving the EU) or join some new FTA and the likelihood is almost 100% that unless you have totally incorruptible politicians who really know their stuff and CARE, you'll have to conform your system to the rules. Just like with building codes. Change anything and they will make me clean up any and all code violations. In the US those code violations are things like what we call Medicare and Social Security, a public retirement and healthcare system that we inherited from the last century, pre WTO. So its days are numbered. The info is buried in a document in Geneva from 1994, an Annex. Not far from the info as to why the 2008 Global Financial Crisis really occurred. Its really a crazy situation, thats causing a lot of dishonesty in high places.
People who have higher risk exposure and the older people always have to pay more. Also, the more wealthy your zip code, the less you likely have to pay because wealthy people are healthier. Right now they use zip codes but they would prefer to use your cell phone location data to price your insurance. Also genetics. thats likely going to come back and be used to price your health insurance. They'll figure in what they know (mostly what you have told them, but in some countries they have generations of data on families and relative health) Also if you get COVID-19 you'll likely soon have to pay a lot more for the rest of your life, or accept that nothing related to it is covered at all.
around here health insurance is paid via tax so the wealthy actually pays more ...
Its probably still up to countries how they handle taxation, but
what they do with their money is limited more and more,
if they have any competition from the commercial sector at all, even if there is only one competitor. Also what is competition? Its anything in a like service which it turns out means anything which can substitute for anything else, so even if you think of healthcare as, well healthcare, its also "like" health insurance. So if you sell insurance, public thing cannot compete with it. But by bit. and soon it can only help those who the market totally fails.
Then the number of rules that apply increases exponentially, zap, and if they are subsidizing or regulating something especially, in our case financial services, it must conform to dozens of rules, including a ceiling established way back in 1998. When they had none of the 2010 relaxations, And if it doesn't its supposed to be eliminated or reduced in scope. Unless what is being done is an "emergency safeguard measure". That seems to be able to last as long as ten years, so 2020...however itsup to their discretion, so we recently had the coronavirus which is arguably a bigger emergency than the 2010 crisis as far as health, but Trump took a different approach and may have used up that emergency completely by picking such a short and abbreviated response just for people who had a contagious disease who were verified and obviously could not work.
So, suppose we revisit the question.. If its "a real emergency", they get to break rules temporarily. How long? I think the honest answer is the least possible time, but for some situations they likely got a lot of leeway because nobody wants this to embarass aybody in the media.
They aren't about to break their own rules, no matter what. So they need an emergency to break the hard and fast rules. However, there are a bunch of different kinds of laws, and its clear they shouldnt just create emergencies when they want to break these rules, or make one up. But who knows, I wouldn't put that beyond some of them at all.
Also, generally all new "measures" of every kind imaginable , a very very broad term, must be be "not more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service" What does that mean? It means that it needs to be the very least possible, and that politicians cannot compromise as they used to, it always has to deregulate. And the status quo gets more restrictive, never less. (but they call that deregulation because its the corporations view) That is actually the core principle of US trade policy on services, it seems to me.
The OECD now has a 'STRI" or Services
Trade Restrictiveness Index" its actually one of at lest two of these indices that purport to tell countries what they can do to remain compliant. But it does not include health insurance, maybe it doesn't include any insurance. But lots of other kinds of regulation are evaluated for their relative
trade restrictiveness. Anyway, I cant talk about this any more. Insurance is a scam, I totally agree.