Poor copy. If the Constitutional Council has validated most of the provisions of the health law, including that on the neutral package, the wise men have pinpointed Marisol Touraine’s flagship measure: generalized third-party payment.
The Minister of Health wanted to impose this provision on the medical profession, the Council limits it to a possibility. Incidentally, the institution agrees with doctors who, for more than a year, loudly denounce an attack on freedom of choice.
“Article 83 calls into question the principles of free choice of doctor by the patient and direct payment of fees by the patient”, writes the Council. With this law, the “entrepreneurial freedom of physicians” was therefore hampered by the direct link established between physicians and payers. Moreover, this freedom “is enshrined in the Constitution”, recalls, with delight, the Parisian, Jean-Pierre Door, deputy Les Républicains, spokesman for the health bill.
And that’s not all. Since the beginning of hostilities, the doctors denounced the gas plant that this measure was going to create. With its words, the Constitutional Council shares the analysis. He “believes that this project makes the legislation unintelligible because, on the one hand, the law requires that the patient pay nothing to the doctor and, on the other, the agreements made between the Health Insurance and the practitioners impose a direct payment fees by the patient, summarizes the journalist Daniel Rosenweg in the daily.
It is therefore a setback for the Minister of Health, analyze your daily newspapers, and a victory for liberal doctors. His firm has clearly argued that the 15 million French people covered at 100% could benefit from the absence of advance payment from December 2016. But, for all the other policyholders, there is no longer any question of right, but of a possibility that the doctor can suggest. The Constitutional Council has put practitioners at the center of the system where the health law made them an intermediary.
