The Barnier government continues to skate around the explosive issue of State Medical Aid (AME), with new contradictory signals sent this week by its ministers. Latest example to date: Bercy said on Tuesday October 15 that it was in favor of freezing the funds allocated to the system, after having initially planned to increase them in the 2025 budget.
Budget Minister Laurent Saint-Martin confirmed information from RMC according to which the government will table an amendment as part of the examination in Parliament of the 2025 budget so that AME expenditure no longer increases next year.
The draft budget presented last Thursday provided for an increase in AME credits of 8%, to 1.3 billion euros, compared to 1.2 in 2024, which had sparked protests among certain elected representatives of the National Rally, opposed to this increase. Questioned on BFMTV, Laurent Saint-Martin explained “that like all expenses we needed to know how to better control them”. While ensuring that the AME, “an issue of public health and humanity”, “would be preserved”.
“Its modification can be done at the margin”
On several occasions, the new Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, has said that he wants to reform the AME and replace it with emergency medical aid with drastically reduced scope. A desire that his colleague from Health clearly does not share. This Wednesday, at the microphone of France InterMinister Geneviève Darrieussecq indicated that the “general framework” of state medical aid would not change. “It is a subject of public health and safety, I am not for its elimination. Its modification can be done at the margins, as recommended in the report by Messrs. Evin and Stefanini [publié en décembre 2023, NDLR]there are a few lines that we can move but that will not change the framework of the AME,” explained the minister.
During the early legislative campaign this summer, the RN indicated that it wanted to replace it with “vital emergency aid”. “Jordan Bardella is using the AME as a scarecrow,” denounced the Minister of Health. The announcement of the freezing of AME credits by the government of Michel Barnier was welcomed by several elected representatives of the RN, including the spokesperson for the deputies Julien Odoul on the social networkaccording to whom this decision was taken “thanks to the mobilization of the National Rally”.
State medical aid provides care for people in an irregular situation residing in France for more than three months, whose resources are low and do not qualify for coverage under the common law system. In 2024, the AME envelope planned by the State represented approximately 0.5% of the health expenditure planned by the Social Security budget (PLFSS). At the end of 2023, there were 466,000 AME beneficiaries.