FFaced with difficulties in accessing care and the persistence of a worrying public health debt since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the government decided at the end of March to increase the prices of certain specialties subject to an under-use of care. This is the case for medicine, palliative care and transplant activities.
Feeling aggrieved that the priorities chosen – which meet the health needs of the French – do not correspond to the activities that private clinics prefer to carry out, their representatives are threatening to strike from June 3. This choice is theirs, but it is not without consequences. As always, the public hospital will be there for all patients, including when clinics close their doors.
Basically, the protest by representatives of the private sector conveys the idea of an advantaged public sector: this is not the case, since support for priority sectors applies in the same way to the public sector and the private sector. In form, their demands too often give rise to the expression of contempt for the public service as well as to false and unnecessarily polemical representations, going so far as to accuse teams of the public hospital to be financed “not to work”. Excess speaks for itself. Let us remember, however, that the lucrative private sector has benefited from the remuneration increases planned by Ségur de la santé and financed with public funds.
The challenges that await us require us to move forward together, far from sterile quarrels, to invent the health of tomorrow. Health serving our fellow citizens, meeting their expectations and able to restore their confidence in the health system.
In a health system rich in its diversity, the strengths and contributions of each person must be recognized. Throughout France, from local hospitals to university hospitals, 1,344 public hospitals provide access to care for the entire population. Their strength is to combine excellence and versatility, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Operating in all disciplines of medicine, surgery or psychiatry, public hospitals have activity profiles much more diverse than private clinics. They provide more than 80% of ongoing institutional care.
The gynecology-obstetrics activity, considered unprofitable by some, is a good illustration of this: the public hospital is the only one which supports all patients and pregnancies, in particular those which are complex with pathologies or difficult births, and cares for newborns requiring resuscitation care. Without forgetting that public hospitals welcome all patients, regardless of their origins or resources, concentrating for example nearly 60% of expenses state medical aid.
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