The Minister of Health Aurélien Rousseau showed on Tuesday his desire to quickly relaunch new price negotiations with private doctors, still angry against the weakness of the 1.5 euro increase which will be granted to them on November 1.
This minimum increase – which will bring the consultation to 26.50 euros for general practitioners and 31.50 euros for specialists, excluding fee overruns – was decided last spring after the failure of previous negotiations with doctors’ unions. .
There should be “no ambiguity” on the fact that this new tariff “is only a passage, not an arrival point”, observed Tuesday the minister during a meeting in Paris with the Liberals of health , a coalition of liberal health professional unions.
On November 1, “I would like us to cross it launched (…) into a dynamic of negotiations” towards new pricing, he explained.
During the previous negotiation, the National Health Insurance Fund (Cnam) had initially proposed a higher increase – 30 euros for general practitioners – but it attached conditions aimed in particular at increasing the number of patients per doctors, who were deemed unacceptable by the unions.
Anger is also brewing among doctors in the face of the bill from MP (Horizons) Frédéric Valletoux aimed at “improving access to care through the territorial commitment of professionals”.
Many caregivers fear that this text, currently under discussion in Parliament, will carry the seeds of new obligations for liberal practitioners in terms of “permanence of care” in the territories, that is to say in particular on-call duty.
All summer, doctors also shouted their “indignation” at the large campaign of Health Insurance controls on sick leave. Several unions – including the main general practitioner union, MG France – have filed strike notice for October 13.
Discussions with doctors are among the “most complicated in the history of agreements” between doctors and the “Secu”, due to the constraints weighing on the health system, observed Mr. Rousseau.
Only the “conventional system”, which involves a discussion with representatives of doctors, is likely to resolve difficulties such as shortages of caregivers or the aging of the population, argued the minister. But in the event of failure, parliament should take control.
Doctor Franck Devulder, president of the CSMF doctors’ union which is part of Liberal Health, was delighted with the voluntarism displayed by the minister.
But like last winter, he will refuse any principle of “give and take”. “We must bring the price of consultations back up to standard”, and this revaluation “must not be subject to special conditions”, he said on the sidelines of the debates.
The move to 30 euros demanded by general practitioners “does not even cover inflation between 2017 and 2023”, he said.
“We will have to be imaginative and propose new things from both sides,” said the general director of Health Insurance, Thomas Fatôme, “convinced” that the themes of “the quality and relevance of care” should “take up more space in the discussions”.
Questioned later by professionals on the future Social Security budget, the Minister of Health Professions Agnès Firmin le Bodo stressed that the budget allocated to health had “increased by more than fifty billion euros” between 2017 and today ‘today.
“The doctors say on their scale that a 1.5 euro (revaluation) is insulting (…) but on the scale of what it represents for the state budget it is 800 million” euros, she argued.
We must both preserve the “social security system” and “find the right balance for good remuneration for each of our professions”, she said, which “is not simple”.
12/09/2023 18:35:36 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP