Not showing up for a medical appointment will no longer be without consequences. The government would like to introduce a rabbit tax for patients who do not respect their commitments. With the latter, each person who does not honor their appointment will have to pay 5 euros to the injured health professional. A small sum, but which should make it possible to make the French responsible and free up time slots, while France is experiencing major shortages of staff in community medicine.
Questioned this Monday on the subject on the set of La Grande interview d’Europe 1-CNews, the head of the list of the left united with Europeans, Léon Deffontaines would like “above all to make the government’s role responsible for the decline in access to care in our society”.
“We don’t have enough doctors”
“It’s always the same thing, it’s the punishment. There is unemployment, we attack the unemployed. There are problems with access to care, we attack the patients”, regrets – he, however, assuring the usefulness of making patients more responsible for showing up for their appointments.
“Of course, when we cannot, if we have an appointment, we must cancel it. What I say, however, is that the problem of access to care today is not not linked to the fact that we have people who do not come to their appointment. It is mainly because today we do not have enough doctors, general practitioners, but not only that, we lack specialists too, throughout the territory”, he continues.
“The problem is medical deserts”
“When we have to wait six months, a year, sometimes even longer to be able to have access to general practitioners, it is not linked to the fact that there are some who do not honor their appointment,” he annoys at the microphone of Europe 1, before denouncing “a smokescreen on a subject that is much more systemic than it seems”. “The problem is the medical deserts, it is the decline of our public hospitals and finally it is the decline more generally of public services in our countryside in particular,” concludes Léon Deffontaines.