Extant literature has largely analysed how European Union (EU) migrant citizens' welfare rights are framed in public discourses and affect social solidarity, delving into the concept of ‘welfare deservingness’. Surprisingly, the healthcare domain is comparatively less researched. Few studies have unpacked the concept of ‘healthcare deservingness’ and its variations across contexts when it comes to intra-EU migration and migrant citizens' healthcare rights. Running a survey experiment in Belgium and Spain (n = 1307 per country), respondents were asked who they would prioritise to access publicly-funded healthcare out of two fictitious patients who randomly differed in nationality, migration status, responsibility over ill-health, and employment status. The results indicate that individuals with a foreign EU nationality, a recent migration history, unemployed and who are deemed responsible for their illness systematically suffer from penalisation intentions to access healthcare. Importantly, foreign EU migrants belonging to the most perceived socially-distant ethnic outgroup suffer from a double penalty in prioritisation intentions. However, differences exist across countries. Deservingness criteria associated with the idea of a (individual and collective) responsibility towards healthcare and its funding have stronger effects in the Belgian social insurance regime, while criteria based on territorial belonging have stronger effects in the Spanish universalistic regime., This work derives from a project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101022244, Peer reviewed

The EU-TRHeaDS Conjoint Dataset is a set of 20,920 observations that was gathered, organised and edited in the framework of the research project ‘EU Citizens’ Transnational Rights and Health-related Deservingness at the Street-level - EU-TRHeaDS’ (PI: Roberta Perna), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101022244.

One of EU-TRHeaDS' aims is to investigate which criteria ‘activate’ the category of healthcare (un)deservingness in the context of intra-EU migration among the general public in two EU Member States (Belgium and Spain), and the extent to which these preferences turn into patterns of systematic penalisation towards specific EU nationality groups. It does so by carrying out a conjoint experimental study nested in an online survey run in parallel in Belgium and Spain with a representative sample of the population on the dimensions of gender, age (18 years old), level of education achieved and geographical region of residence. During the four tasks of the experiment, respondents were asked who they would prioritise to access publicly-funded healthcare out of two fictitious patients who differed in four attributes, all randomly assigned: 1) nationality; 2) migration trajectory; 3) responsibility over ill health, and 4) employment status.

As a subset of a larger survey on intra-EU mobility and access to healthcare rights, the EU-TRHeaDS Conjoint Dataset specifically includes the socio-demographic variables of the probabilistic sample in each country, the variables of the conjoint experiment and information about the time spent by respondents in completing each of the four experimental tasks.
For detailed information and the codebook, see the document 'EU-TRHeaDS_conjoint_Description&Codebook', European Commission, EU Citizens’ Transnational Rights and Health-related Deservingness at the Street-level 101022244, Peer reviewed