The revaluation of dental care and the cap on prosthesis prices have been ratified. This text should reduce the rest payable by patients.
Going to the dentist will be cheaper from the 1er January 2018. The Ministry of Health has just published a adopted in the Official Journal endorsing the arbitration organizing the relationship between dental surgeons and health insurance.
This text sets up the new consultation rates for dentists throughout France and overseas territories, as well as the billing limit prices applicable to patients for prostheses or crowns. These measures are supposed to promote oral prevention and reduce the burden on patients, explains the ministry.
To give dentists time to adapt, the limit prices will be set gradually over 4 years. These will come into force on 1er January of each year until 2021.
For example, for an all-ceramic crown, the price will drop from 590 euros to 550 euros between 2018 and 2021, except in departments 75, 78, 91, 92, Guyana, Martinique, and Guadeloupe where the prices will decrease by 700 at 610 euros.
At the same time, the reimbursement base for crowns, the most common prosthetic procedures, will increase from 107.5 euros to 120 euros in 2019.
Increased consultations
In return for this pricing, arbitration provides for revaluations of certain acts such as scaling or the treatment of cavities. Measures are also taken to improve the monitoring of patients at risk. These include diabetic patients for whom dentists will receive 35 euros from Health Insurance for a periodontal assessment.
Likewise, to facilitate access to care for patients with severe mental disabilities, dental surgeons will see their care improved. If patients have to be sedated for treatment, dentists will receive 90 euros, otherwise they will receive 60 euros. According to Marisol Touraine, Minister of Health, these measures amount to 273 million euros, an average gain of 7,600 euros for a liberal surgeon by 2021.
Angry trade unionists
A speech that did not convince the profession. For her, these new tariffs are a “declaration of war”. Dentists particularly regret that these prices are lower than those offered by Health Insurance, which they had yet rejected en bloc at the end of January.
Wind up against arbitration, the dentist unions have decided not to let go. The president of the National Confederation of Dental Trade Unions (CNSD), Catherine Mojaïsky, declared on Twitter that she was launching legal remedies against this arbitration. Actions will also be carried out “with politicians so that the future government returns to these provisions and the step-by-step mobilization of the profession”. “The objective is to bring down this regulation and to replace it with another text without the sword of Damocles, or governmental contempt”, explains the union, while specifying that “these actions are not against our patients but the fair means to be heard and to make known to as many people as possible the daily work of dental surgeons for the benefit of the oral health of our fellow citizens ”.
.
