Are we approaching the end of the standoff between general practitioners and the State? While the six unions representing private doctors met this Thursday afternoon at the headquarters of the National Health Insurance Fund (Cnam) to negotiate prices for the next five years, Health Insurance opened the way to increase to 30 euros in the consultation of general practitioners demanded by the profession. But also demanded in return “developments in favor of improving the health of the population”.
Health Insurance “confirms that it is ready to finance an increase in the general practitioner consultation to 30 euros and increase measures specific to each of the specialties”, she indicated in a press release. However, these “will only be implemented if they are accompanied by other developments” in the current negotiations, she added.
“These price changes will only happen if we have a global agreement, which includes advances in return, to improve access to care, the quality and relevance of procedures, and also ambitious transformations in remuneration methods. I repeat, we will have an agreement on everything or an agreement on nothing”, insisted the boss of Health Insurance Thomas Fatôme in an interview At Figaro, published this Thursday. Discussions are expected to continue in the coming weeks, with Health Insurance announcing a new plenary session “in the first half of March”.
A request for “improvements in access to care”
The consultation at 30 euros – compared to 26.50 euros currently – was the minimum demand of the unions with regard to general practitioners. In recent months, the government and Health Insurance have for their part sent signals favorable to an increase in the price of consultations, but have until now been quite vague as to the precise amount that they were ready to set.
This time will also have made it possible to determine the expected rewards for this increase in consultation. Health Insurance is therefore asking that the negotiations lead to an “ambitious overhaul of flat-rate remuneration”, with the possibility of “fully flat-rate” remuneration for doctors wishing it. She also calls for “improvements in terms of access to care”, in particular a strengthening of private doctor duty “in the first part of the night”.
Reduce medication consumption
She also wants “a very ambitious action program on the quality and relevance of care”, a way of demanding more commitment from doctors to stem the inexorable growth in health spending. On this point, Health Insurance particularly targets the consumption of medicines: France is the fourth country with the highest consumption of antibiotics in Europe, behind Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, according to figures from Public Health France.
Price negotiations with doctors failed last year. This failure led to the application of a provisional rate, increasing basic consultations by 1.50 euros, an amount deemed insufficient by all doctors’ unions even though the rates had not changed since 2017.