The Minister of Health wants to “stabilize” at 700,000 the number of chronically ill without a doctor, then will try to reverse the trend.
The government hopes to “stabilize” the number, which is constantly increasing, of chronically ill patients without a doctor, to then reduce their number, explained Tuesday in Créteil the Minister of Health François Braun.
Emmanuel Macron promised in January that each patient with a long-term illness (ALD) without a treating doctor would be offered a solution before the end of the year.
These patients are about 700,000, according to figures from the Ministry of Health, due in particular to growing medical desertification.
The scale of the next retirements of general practitioners is such that it is necessary to hope to stabilize this number at first, before managing to reduce it, François Braun indicated on Monday.
Reverse the curve later
“We are in a race to at least stabilize the curve” of the number of ALD patients without a treating doctor, “and then reverse it” declared the Minister, visiting the Primary Health Insurance Fund of Val-de- Marne, is at the forefront of these efforts towards ALD patients.
In the Val-de-Marne department, “40% of doctors are over 60 and will retire in the coming years,” said François Braun. These doctors “have chronic patients” and “we will have to immediately treat this new flow” of people without a attending physician.
The National Health Insurance Fund (Cnam) is trying to impose on liberal general practitioners commitments to increase their medical time in front of the patient, within the framework of the new medical convention for the next five years.
The CNAM proposed a consultation upgraded to 30 euros for general practitioners accepting commitments in this direction, against 26.5 euros for the others. But negotiations with the doctors’ unions have failed, and the ball is now in the hands of an arbitrator, a former senior civil servant whose proposals will be imposed on the doctors and the Cnam.
In total in France, approximately 6 million people in France do not have a general practitioner.