Improving prevention and facilitating access to care is the ambition of Marisol Touraine with her health bill which is presented to the Council of Ministers this Wednesday, October 15. Laudable ambitions that should be unanimous. However, the opposition is strong, and especially on the side of the doctors. For them, the end does not justify the means.
Doctors’ unions are first of all up against the generalization of third-party payment. Questioned in Le Parisien, the Minister of Health defends her bill point by point: “I demand the generalization of third-party payment as an ambitious measure of access to care for all, declares Marisol Touraine. For me, this is as important an issue as the implementation of universal health coverage (CMU). The conditions for its implementation must be reassuring for health professionals. “The problem is that they are not reassured, precisely. Doctors fear the complexity of setting up such a device, but not only… “The consultation in general medicine is 23 euros. Tomorrow, if you impose the generalization of third-party payment, it will have to be amputated from the management costs of 2 euros 50 per act. This we cannot accept! “, recently confided to whydoctor Dr. Jean-Paul Ortiz, president of the main union of liberal doctors, the CSMF.
Another irritating subject for doctors is the transfer of medical tasks to health professionals other than doctors. A casus belli for the CSMF which cannot accept that other professionals can establish diagnoses.
The creation of an attending physician for children also gives some practitioners pimples. And above all, divide generalists and pediatricians. For the latter, parents must retain the freedom to consult a pediatrician or a general practitioner, depending on the needs of their child and the availability of local professionals.
To facilitate access to a doctor on call, the bill also provides for the creation of a unique 3-digit number to improve access to a doctor in each department outside of office opening hours. This time, the liberal doctors say no because they do not want to be “put under the control of SAMUs or public hospitals, otherwise we will have a disengagement of liberal professionals”, warns Dr. Ortiz.
The list of grievances is long and the doctors are hot. Liberals and hospital workers have already gone on strike this fall. Some against the proposed reform of regulated professions, others for their working conditions in the hospital. This bill therefore runs the risk of rekindling already hot embers.
