After a month of arm wrestling with the government around the 2023 Social Security budget, the unions of biologists are taking a new step and calling for an “unlimited strike” by medical analysis laboratories from this Monday, November 14. The movement, which should last at least until Thursday, is widely followed with nearly “95%” of sites on strike according to the unions. It is therefore not possible to get tested for Covid or to go for a blood test except in an emergency. The latter are taken care of by hospitals and nurses who send the analyzes directly to the laboratory.
The white coats are protesting against article 27 of the social security financing bill (PLFSS) 2023 which provides for 250 million euros in savings to be made by will or by force in their sector, while a solemn vote on the entire PLFSS – hit with a 49.3 in the National Assembly – will be organized on Tuesday.
“The tests [réalisés pendant la crise sanitaire] enabled pharmaceutical laboratories to achieve a turnover of 7 billion euros. These tests, I remind you, are paid for by social security, that is to say by all French people, insisted Gabriel Attal, Minister in charge of Public Accounts, at the microphone of LCI this Monday morning. It is a sector whose profitability is high, it has increased, I believe, from 18% to 30%. Many economic sectors would like to have such profitability.”
“Austerity Madness”
In the absence of an agreement with the National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM) and the government, the laboratories stopped transmitting the results of these screenings to the national SI-DEP file for a week, disrupting the monitoring of the epidemic. A boycott deemed “inconsequential” and “inadmissible” by the Minister of Health, François Braun, who even accused them of “taking the entire population hostage”. This warning shot did not move the lines: received on November 7 at Health Insurance, the biologists left the meeting by denouncing “austerity madness” and calling for a “renewable strike”.
Faced with the strong reaction of professionals in the sector, the senators voted on November 11 an amendment to the PLFSS for 2023 transforming this “perennial decline into an exceptional contribution of 250 million euros in 2023”. A solution hailed by the unions. “We agree to participate in this collective effort following the Covid crisis, in particular via an exceptional tax. On the other hand, we do not agree that these savings should be made on routine and emergency analyzes in a way sustainable as what is proposed by the government, explains to L’Express Lionel Barrand, president of the national union of medical biologists, who specifies that the profits of the laboratories made during the health crisis are rather around “600 million euros, all mixed up”.
“It’s disgusting to be singled out as war profiteers, after everything we’ve been through for two years (physical attacks, extended hours, burnouts, etc.). We were in front line,” he said. “250 million euros on permanent price reductions means more than 1.2 billion euros between 2023 and 2026. We cannot survive that, abounds Alain Le Meur, spokesperson for the Alliance of the medical biology (ABM) which represents the laboratories (Biogroup, Cerba, Eurofins, Inovie, Synlab). This will lead to the closure of laboratories in the most tense areas, a reduction in investment for innovation and prevention. For us, it really is a disaster.”
CPAM open to negotiation
According to Lionel Barrand, Olivier Véran, then Minister of Health, had assured the unions that the money spent during the health crisis to invest in machines and personnel at the request of the government would then not be included “on the envelope of routine biology”. “However, this is exactly what they want to do less than a year later, plagues the trade unionist. The government lied. How can we trust our authorities, when, at this level of the State, we capable of breaking his word? And to add: “It was not us who decided on the prices and the policy of the open bar, it was the government. However, at the time we had warned them that we could screen better and less. They did not listen to us and continued with their consumerist and demagogic speech which consisted in making test everyone without medical reason. And now, they attack us for having done the work which they themselves asked of us. It’s not decent.”
For the director general of the CPAM, Thomas Fatôme, the laboratories have the means to pay what the government asks of them. “For a sector that was already very profitable before the Covid (about 1 billion euros in annual profit in 2019), which made extraordinary profits linked to the Covid, having a simple exceptional contribution, one-off in 2023, does not seem to us adapted to the situation”, he explains at the microphone of franceinfo on Monday, not however closing the door to negotiations.