Health insurance expenses: why they are slipping

France definitely no longer has the means to afford innovative and very expensive drugs. For sweet dreamers who are not yet convinced, just read the latest figures from Health Insurance, relayed by all the press. In 2014, expenditure for the general system increased by 3.1%, “a very strong growth in reimbursements for health products due to the ramp-up, throughout the year, of reimbursements for new treatments against HCV “, specifies the Health Insurance. But, as stated the Parisian, “the price of one of them, Sovaldi, from the American laboratory Gilead, was renegotiated by the government last November, to reach 41,000 euros for 12 weeks of treatment, against 57,000 previously. »

On the side of the Ministry of Health, the reaction was not long in coming: these figures are “provisional”, it is specified. Clearly, by spring, everything will be back to normal and “Ondam 2014 will be well respected”. The national health insurance spending target has been set at +2.4%. With an increase of 3.1%, we are therefore well above.

Will controlling the price of Sovaldi be enough to avoid slippage? Not sure because, as pointed out Le Figaro, “other items of expenditure are changing in a worrying way. This is particularly the case for reimbursements of nursing care (+5.7%), physiotherapy (+5%). But, here again, the Ministry of Health wants to be reassuring. These figures would only be the translation of the ambulatory turn that France is taking. In other words, the increase in these out-of-town expenditures should be offset by a drop in expenditures in follow-up care and rehabilitation facilities.

But the list of rising expenses is long: +4% for daily allowances, +3.5% on medical transport…

Already last October, the health insurance spending alert committee had predicted that Ondam 2015 would be difficult to hold, and that there was a real risk of slippage. The experts of the committee then wrote in a very civilized way that “the management of Ondam should be demanding” if we do not want to get out of the nails and that structural reforms had to be started “to permanently influence expenditure”. Not sure that the account is there and that the alert committee is not obliged to sound the alarm again.