Minister of Health Aurélien Rousseau at the Elysée, August 30, 2023 (AFP/Ludovic MARIN)
The Minister of Health Aurélien Rousseau will officially relaunch conventional negotiations with liberal doctors, in conflict with the government, by sending a framing letter to their union representatives on Tuesday in which he will confirm renouncing the territorial commitment contract.
“On Tuesday, I will send to the Director General of Health Insurance the framework letter containing the guidelines for conventional negotiation with doctors. It will be much shorter, with fewer objectives,” declared Mr. Rousseau in a interview with Ouest-France published this Sunday.
Liberal doctors, at the call of their representatives, began a national strike movement on Friday ahead of these new price negotiations and the examination of a controversial law in the Senate.
The strike must continue at least until Monday evening and a new meeting of the inter-union.
“There is no deafness on my part to what is happening”, underlined the Minister of Health in Ouest-France, confirming in the daily newspaper that he was renouncing a system which had made the “liberals” bristle, the contract of territorial commitment.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the territorial commitment of doctors is underway. Nearly 80% of the population is covered by a CPTS (hyperlocal networks between health professionals) We were halfway there last year. I am not at all renouncing this notion of territorial commitment, but I think that it does not necessarily need the conventional approach to progress on its own. “, explained Aurélien Rousseau to Ouest-France.
In front of the 29th universities of liberal doctors of the CSMF union in Arcachon (Gironde) on October 7, Mr. Rousseau had already sealed the abandonment of the “territorial commitment contract”, an individual contract between the doctor and Health Insurance which allowed to obtain a higher revaluation of the consultation (30 euros for general practitioners for example), if the practitioner accepted an assortment of constraints, including sometimes working on Saturdays, increasing his patient base, more on-call duty and the hiring of a medical assistant.
The introduction of a “form of conditionality”, from the revaluation of the consultation to the local commitment of the doctor, “was an error”, explained the Minister of Health.
Negotiations between liberal doctors and Health Insurance failed last winter, leading to an unnegotiated increase of 1.5 euros that all parties, including the government, consider insufficient, and that it can only be ‘a step”.
© 2023 AFP
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