“Amazon” medicine is indeed arriving in France. In addition to your Netflix subscription, will you soon have the “doctor” subscription? It’s in the air. Like the American logistics giant, the number one private healthcare provider, Ramsay, is launching an unprecedented subscription offer for teleconsulting doctors.
“With a subscription at 11.90 euros per month, you can teleconsult a doctor whenever you need, all costs included”, writes Ramsay Services to describe this offer called “24/7”, in reference to the slots of unlimited opening, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Like the major communications operators, such as Netflix or Canal Plus, Ramsay Services offers the customer to “take a look at everything that [his] subscription includes; more than twenty medical specialties represented: general practitioners, gynecologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, pharmacists, nurses. No filters, no middlemen, no waiting times.”
And also plays the “tricolor” card by specifying that “100% of doctors and paramedical professionals are graduates in France and registered with the Council of the Order of Physicians or the order of their profession”. However, the operator adds in the “general conditions of sale” that the number of calls to the teleconsultation service “cannot exceed a reasonable number, i.e. 20 per year”.
Deputy Valletoux’s bill, currently under discussion in committee in Parliament, and which will be examined next week, proposes to tighten the conditions for the exercise of on-call duty for doctors, but it is arousing very strong opposition from of practitioners who already feel overwhelmed. In this blocked context, which adds to the perpetual crisis of the hospital, the operator Ramsay tries to interfere in the breach to meet a real demand from the public, who are tired of not being able to find doctors. available.
If proposals in telemedicine are already emerging, and are progressing, there was none of a comparable scale, and especially carried by one of the largest operators of the health system. At 11.90 euros per month, this therefore represents an annual subscription of 142.80 euros, an “unlimited” offer which will strongly compete with a medical sector in full turmoil.
Critics, expected, were quick, left and right. “Do we have to pay to access care? The multinational Ramsay unveils a very special subscription for access to video consultations. An unprecedented attack on equality in the face of care”, protests the collective Our public services.
In fact, medical teleconsultations, offered by this type of platform, are reimbursed by Health Insurance, but the subscription itself to benefit from Ramsay’s services is the responsibility of the customer. The development of teleconsultation is obviously a reality. Until now, practitioners could not devote more than 20% of their activity to it.
But Emmanuel Macron hinted that this provision could be relaxed as part of the ongoing reflection on the supply of care. Ramsay’s “Doctor Subscription” also fits into this perspective. By dint of failing to organize itself, the French health system is coming to such types of upheavals.