[makomk]

That's a huge long-running mess. The EU rules on free movement are written around the assumption that health care is insurance-based, and contain a rule stating that people must either be employed or have "comprehensive sickness insurance" in order to exercise that right for more then three months. This clashes badly with the UK's unique setup of healthcare for all that's free at the point of use. Other EU countries with "universal healthcare" are set up as state-run insurance schemes where you must either be employed or claiming one of a specific set of benefits to have healthcare, and this works fine with the EU rules - they can just charge an insurance fee to students from other EU states. Non-EU nationals residing in the UK pay a similar surcharge to fund their use of the NHS, but EU nationals can't be charged that because it technically isn't insurance. The European Commission's interpretation of the rules is that the NHS counts as comprehensive sickness insurance and every EU national who moves here should be able to get free healthcare forever even if they don't pay a penny; this would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that we're basically the only EU state that has to do this!

The right to permanent residence after five years is then restricted to "Union citizens and their family members who have resided in the host Member State in compliance with the conditions laid down in this Directive during a continuous period of five years". So it depends heavily on how those conditions are interpreted.

[gpderetta]

It is not unique. Italy (another large EU founding state) has pretty much exactly the same setup as UK.

edit: the Italian SSN (Servizio Sanitario Nazionale) was basically modeled on the NHS.