The social security financing bill (PLFSS) plans to impose 250 million euros in savings per year on biology laboratories.
Dissatisfied, biologists oppose it and threaten to stop feeding the national file of Covid-19 screening tests, the SI file-DEP.“Faced with the deafness of the public authorities, we have decided to suspend the transmission of screening data on the SI-DEP platform from October 27, explained to AFP the president of the Alliance for medical biology, Alain Le Meur.
Concretely, patients will be able to continue to perform Covid PCR and antigen tests and receive their results, but “there will be no more monitoring of the epidemic”. Because IUntil now, the biologists notify the results in the SI-DEP database. Thus, all the data allows Public Health France to monitor the number of daily positive tests and to refine the strategy for managing the epidemic.
This tool essential monitoring and prevention of the epidemic will no longer be powered. In addition, this blackmail will have a blow for the laboratories, which will no longer be reimbursed by health insurance: shortfall assessed at 14 million euros per week.
According to Health Insurance, biologists take the monitoring of the epidemic hostage
DBefore the Senate, the Minister of Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal, justified the measure by “an already high profitability before the crisis” and further increased by an increase of more than seven billion “of test-related revenue” for two years. For biologists, this measure is acceptable “exceptionally” for the year 2023 but “not for a totally blind plane”castigated Alain Le Meur, the president of the Alliance for medical biology.The laboratory professionals have finally declared that they are “capable of going further”, until “a strike if the government does not understand (them)”.
Health Insurance reacted on October 27 to this action. “Taking the monitoring of the Covid-19 epidemic hostage in this way is unacceptable in view of the health context and the public health issues., To declaree Thomas Fatomethe director of the National Health Insurance Fundbefore calling biologists “in the spirit of responsibility”.
And points out that the The medical biology sector is characterized by financial profitability which was already high before the health crisis (more than 17% between 2016 and 2019) and which has increased further since (between 20 to 30 % in 2020 and 2021), due to Covid-related tests.
Sources:
- AFP
- Health insurance press release, 27 October.
