The French hospital federation publishes an alarming statement on the state of hospital finances in France. She calls on the government to react. Liberal doctors’ unions denounce false accusations.
Hospital coffers are empty. The president of the hospital federation of France (FHF) issued a statement as a cry of alarm. The deficit for 2017 would be 1.5 billion euros. A threshold never reached. In comparison, it amounted to 470 million euros in 2016. For Frédéric Valletoux, president of the FHF, this situation is due to two things: the many savings plans and the absence of structural reforms.
Vital reforms
“Structural and financial reforms now vital”, the president of the FHF calls on the government to act. For him, the annual savings plans (around 3 billion euros over 3 years) have had an impact on the deterioration of hospital accounts.
The activity of these would have been lower than what had been planned, but it is on this estimate that the hospitalization rates were built. But when we compare hospital spending in France compared to other countries, we see that the share of hospital spending (41%) is higher than the EU-15 average (38%).
City doctors react
Frédéric Valletoux targets city doctors. He affirms that “the government plans, for the third consecutive year to make hospitals pay for the dynamism of city spending. He accuses in particular a bad estimate of the cost of the medical convention, which concerns liberal health professionals.
The confederation of French medical unions reacted during the day. Its president, Dr. Jean-Paul Ortiz, evokes a “free affirmation” and recalls that public hospitals and the medical convention are separate, both in terms of expenditure objectives and budgets. On the other hand, city medicine has already absorbed a large art of hospital transfers: each year, hospital prescriptions carried out in the city (PHEV) help to eat up half of the increase in the city ONDAM.
And the development of the hospital’s outpatient activity, in particular in surgery, has resulted in greater solicitation from city doctors. According to Dr. Jean-Paul Ortiz, we cannot indefinitely urge liberal doctors to ensure the shift to ambulatory without giving them the necessary resources!
The FHF calls for a thaw of loan balances and calls for a series of structural reforms: relaxation of internal management methods, reform of the financing of the health system or the revival of investment in hospitals.
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