The growth in sick leave is “unsustainable” with regard to the Social Security budget, warned Sunday, the Minister of Health Aurélien Rousseau who says he favors controls and “collective responsibility” to curb these health expenses.
Asked about LCI, the new minister seems not to favor the hypothesis of an extension of the waiting period to contain the increase in the cost of sick leave which jumped in 2022 by 7.9%.
“I do not believe that the solution is in the worst reimbursement”, even if “it is one of the tracks which are on the table”, he declared.
Among the solutions considered to control this increase, Mr. Rousseau explained that he wanted above all “more checks, go faster”, deploring that today “for an employer, it is extremely heavy to trigger checks”.
He also called for more “collective responsibility”, from the patient to the employers, including the doctors.
However, he recalled that half of the stoppages are “very long stoppages, generally for quite old people, these are stoppages linked in part to suffering at work, to the need for retraining”, as many subjects which refer to the “quality of life at work, a project that the government intends to open with the social partners.
In its 2023 “expenses and products” report, the Health Insurance had estimated the expenditure on daily allowances excluding Covid at 13.5 billion euros (excluding maternity), an average increase per year since 2010 of 3.8% that neither population growth nor rising wages are sufficient to fully explain.
Mr. Rousseau also confirmed that the increase in the deductible on medicines was one of the other ways of saving envisaged within the framework of the social security finance bill (PLFSS) 2024.
“Where do we find the resources to increase the means of the hospital if we cannot manage to keep the expenditure on the IJ (daily allowances) or on the price of the drugs? asked Aurélien Rousseau.