“You stop everything, it’s too expensive, we don’t have the money” : at the end of August 2011, Roselyne Bachelot deciphers the note that François Fillon gives her discreetly, in the Council of Ministers. Hastily scribbled, the Prime Minister’s words sign the death warrant for the dependency reform that the Minister of Solidarity has been carrying for over a year. In July, Mr. Fillon had reassured her: the promise of the presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy will be kept. “I will create a fifth branch of Social Security to devote sufficient resources to the loss of autonomy”, had engaged the future president in campaign, in 2007. Mr.me Bachelot had traveled across France to promote reform. It will remain a dead letter.
While Emmanuel Macron had promised a law on dependency in 2018, his mandate ends and the site has disappeared from the radar. A renunciation that is nothing new then under the last three five-year terms, three major projects in favor of old age have stalled. ” [En 2011], we were in the midst of the eurozone crisis with the prospect of very heavy widening of deficits, remembers a pillar of the Elysee under Nicolas Sarkozy. Committing to offering new services to the elderly without being able to say how we would finance them did not seem to make much sense to us. “ In his book The Little Girl of the Ve (Flammarion, 2015), Roselyne Bachelot consoles herself as best she can for this abandonment: “We have done the job, and, my faith, if France returns to a better fortune, everything is ready. “
When Michèle Delaunay was appointed Minister Delegate in charge of the elderly and autonomy, in 2012, once François Hollande at the Elysee Palace, everything had to be started over. The former oncologist succeeded in having Act I of the law on the adaptation of society to aging, promulgated in 2016, adopted. “However, Marisol Touraine, Minister of Health, wanted to postpone it until the end of the five-year term, remembers Mme Delaunay. What we postpone at the end of the five-year term, we know what happens … It is thanks to the Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, if the law could not be swept aside. ”
The deal has changed
But when Manuel Valls was appointed Prime Minister, in 2014, he buried Act II of his reform, devoted to accommodation establishments for dependent elderly people (Ehpad). While Hollande makes youth his priority, Michèle Delaunay pleads with the President of the Republic: “The French do not all have children, she whispered in his ear one day. But all French people absolutely have two parents and four grandparents. “ Received one day, by Emmanuel Macron, then secretary general of the Elysee, Mr.me Delaunay remembers that the hearing lasted over an hour. “I came out fully inflated, telling myself: it’s in my pocket… And then nothing. “
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