It’s official, the government has decided to lower the prices of private clinics by 2.% for the year 2015, and those of public hospitals from 1%. The announcement was confirmed on Tuesday March 10 by the Federation of Private Hospitalization (FHP), following information published by the website of the newspaper Les Echos. The Ministry of Health itself later confirmed these figures to Le Figaro.
This decision was announced to the representatives of the clinics and hospitals during a meeting at the Ministry of Health, a spokesperson for the FHP told AFP, describing this measure as “particularly serious”. The FHP has also decided to meet its executive committee this Wednesday afternoon, March 11, to discuss “probable retaliatory measures”, added the spokesperson.
For the Federation of private hospitalization, this decision amounts to renouncing the tax benefits and the reductions in the burden granted to private companies under the Competitiveness and Employment Tax Credit (Cice) and the Responsibility Pact.
Even if the clinics more or less expected to lose these advantages, they did not imagine a measure of such magnitude in their regard. “Clinics are thus the only companies not to benefit from these two systems. [le Cice et le Pacte de responsabilité] for jobs and growth,” protested the spokesperson at the AFP microphone. Usually fixed on March 1, these price reductions must still be published in the Official Journal and will apply retroactively. They will define the amount of reimbursements from Health Insurance to private hospitals for the 2,300 acts of care listed, according to their degree of severity in particular.
In 2014, private clinics had already had to face a 0.24% drop in health insurance billing rates, even if those of public hospitals had remained stable.
For the government, it is above all a question of restoring equity between the two private and public hospital sectors. The private clinics have already announced that they will parade with the doctors’ unions this Sunday, March 15 “against the health bill and for the defense of liberal medicine and private hospitalization. »
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