It took a year for the healthcare access contracts announced in October 2012 to finally come into force. It is true that the agreement signed between the National Health Insurance Fund (Cnam) and the doctors’ unions stipulated that a third of the doctors who could aspire to these contracts had to have signed for them to come into force. However, at 1er Last July, the milestone of 8,300 doctors’ signatures was far from being crossed. Trade unions and health insurance fund have therefore fought the campaign so that enough doctors can finally be convinced to join this new reimbursement sector, halfway between sector 1 and sector 2.
According to Le Figaro, a total of 8,611 doctors have agreed to limit their excess fees in exchange for reducing their social charges.
The liberal doctors of sector 1, that is to say choosing to join the medical convention, practice a single consultation price: 23 euros for a general practitioner, 25 euros for a specialist. The liberal doctors of sector 2 practice free fees. We then speak of excess fees because the prices charged are higher than the agreed rates set by social security.
Following the new agreement, the excess fees may not exceed 70 euros for doctors who have chosen to sign this contract for access to care. And patients who consult these doctors will be reimbursed on the basis of 28 euros and no longer on the basis of 23 euros. They will receive 18.60 euros from the Social Security, and no longer 15.10 euros.
The access to care contracts start a few days after leaving the study of UFC-What to Choose revealing that “the overruns of specialist doctors’ fees have followed a staggering upward trend”. The association for the defense of consumers analyzed for a year the overruns of pediatricians, ophthalmologists and gynecologists and showed that two-thirds of them had increased their prices during the previous year.
