LIn his address to the French on March 12, 2020, Emmanuel Macron declared: “What this pandemic reveals is that there are goods and services that must be placed outside the laws of the market. » He concluded: “The coming weeks and months will require breakthrough decisions in this direction. I will assume them. »
The increase in public health spending during the Ségur de la santé could have heralded the return of the welfare state. Everything leads us, unfortunately, to believe the opposite. This is evidenced by the recent Sciences Po report from July 2023 on the financialization of health as well as comments from private equity players collected in Decision Makers magazine in June 2021 and September 2022.
Financial players know the deficits of the health system and its links with state failures. Arnaud Petit, president of Edmond de Rothschild Corporate Finance, explains in Decision Makers magazine that, if private equity has a “real craze” for the healthcare sector, there are several reasons, the first being the “relative disengagement of the State”. Others, like Benoît Poulain, head of mergers and acquisitions within the Elsan group, believe “necessary to develop territorial medical cooperation and [de] encourage diversification to, ultimately, improve the quality of healthcare provision”.
For Gilles Bigot and Julie Vern Cesano-Gouffrant, of the Winston & Strawn firm, investment funds play a driving role in “modernize, optimize and industrialize the medical sector”. And to add: “The financialization of health must be demonized in order to highlight its advantages, which meet a need of the population. »
Doctors dispossessed of their work tools
In fact, financialization, since the 2010s, has only accentuated the logic of concentration and industrialization of healthcare structures launched by public policies. Its strategy has been the same everywhere: strive to take control of structures, if necessary by buying them back expensively from their professional owners, and “rationalize” activities to make them more profitable. The capital contribution is accompanied by a reorganization of work through new governance.
Doctors who have become employees no longer have control of their work tools and no longer influence strategic orientations. The new structures thus made profitable can then be resold, in particular to pension funds.
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