Doctors are not rebels at heart. The strike is not part of their DNA. The current rebellious movement against the health bill is therefore all the more remarkable. Marisol Touraine knows this well. This is why the Minister of Health is playing the consultation card. In an exclusive interview with Le Figaro, Marisol Touraine said: “I hear the concerns of city doctors. And if it is necessary to adjust, clarify, improve the aspects of this law, I will do it. »
To defuse the conflict, it announces that it will continue the consultation and meet again with all the players concerned by mid-December. And “all the actors concerned”, that makes a lot of people: the unions of liberal doctors who, like one man, are all calling for the closing of practices between December 24 and 31, but also the representatives of clinics and internal. If the latter do not fight directly against the health bill, the others simply ask for the withdrawal of the text.
In the interview she gave to Figaro, Marisol Touraine therefore lists the subjects that annoy. The first of them is the generalization of third-party payment. And there, the minister does not give up. She affirms that “the delays in payment of doctors by Health Insurance will not exceed a few days”. Not sure that the doctors take her word for it! And that, in any case, “the third-party payment, very quickly, will go without saying”, she adds.
Another great fear of doctors to which the Minister of Health responds: the loss of the freedom of choice of the practitioner, one of the pillars of liberal medicine, to which the unions are very attached. Here again, Marisol Touraine tries to reassure on the role of the regional health agencies which will not take all the powers. “Since I have been in my position, I have only developed the incentives for installation. There is not a gram of coercion in the proposals, but on the contrary, measures which promote the exercise of liberal medicine, ”declares the minister in the columns of the daily.
As for the possibility that would be given to pharmacists and nurses to vaccinate, the minister is not giving up either. Yet it is one of the subjects that annoys liberal doctors the most.
The room for maneuver of the Minister of Health therefore seems narrow. What can she let go of? Generalized third-party payment will not be compulsory, doctors already know this. The ARS will not be super health prefects with full powers… We will have to provide proof of this. Doctors will not be satisfied with fine words. They know very well that the united front they have succeeded in building is unprecedented.
