Breaking News: Healthcare Providers Across Belgium Protest New Regulations
Healthcare providers across Belgium are speaking out on social media platforms, including LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook, expressing their growing concerns over new regulations that are impacting their ability to deliver quality care. The collective voice of generalists, specialists, physiotherapists, dentists, nurses, and more is raising alarm bells about a shift towards a supervisory medicine, where practitioners feel they are merely executing budgetary logistics rather than providing patient care.
Voices of Dissent
“What we denounce is a progressive shift towards a supervisory medicine, where the practitioner is only an executor obeying a budgetary logic,” summarizes a general practitioner on LinkedIn. “Today I am a doctor on strike. Because I do not want an authoritarian drift in health care decisions. Because I want to continue to provide quality care. Because I like my job and patients deserve better than a medical or two-speed medicine. Because I’m tired of contempt. However, I will go to the hospital to maintain urgent and necessary care. We do not let the patients fall!” declares a psychiatrist on LinkedIn.
Concrete Realities
Behind these measures, healthcare providers are facing non-reimbursed investments, advanced materials payable by the professional, increasing administrative pressures, and financial uncertainty. A hospital practitioner testifies on Facebook: “A delivery in the middle of the night is billed 390 euros. After levy by the hospital, I have 257 euros gross. Once the costs and contributions have been paid, I only have 70 to 80 euros net left … for sometimes four hours of work.”
Beyond Fee Issues
Providers express discomfort that goes beyond the issue of fees. “I am not a trader. I am a caregiver. But the charges are there: an assistant to pay, sterile equipment to buy, updates to incessant standards. And yet, we would like me to lower my prices, that we never exceed anything … in the name of what? So as not to offend a mutual,” laments a healthcare provider.
Daily Exhaustion
On the networks, testimonies also draw a heavy mental charge. A dentist evokes overwork, isolation: “We expect us that we are irreproachable, available 24 hours a day, and at the same time subject to absurd administrative constraints. We forget that we are human.” A general practitioner adds: “I have to manage an entire consultation in fifteen minutes. I no longer have time to listen, to understand, to examine properly. I no longer treat, I treat the chain.”
Ethical and Administrative Concerns
Another point of tension: the growing role of mutuals, accused of insurance drift, abusive retention of reimbursements, and excessive control over providers. “Mutuals are no longer social partners. They have become private insurers who seek to save on the back of care,” summarizes a doctor. Payment delays of up to four months, refusal of unjustified reimbursement, intrusive requests for medical data: examples abound. Some practitioners report that files are now outsourced abroad, including in India, posing a serious confidentiality problem. “Where is the social mission of mutuals?” Asks a general practitioner.
Call for Reform
Providers do not oppose any reform. They ask for worthy consultation, respect for their expertise, recognition of their commitment. “The worst system is where patients believe that care is free, and doctors, that healing does not cost,” says a frontline doctor. “A health reform cannot be built without those who embody its vocation. Imposing rules without consultation, weakening liberal medicine in the name of ideology or accounting management is to make the choice of the short term. On July 7, caregivers do not desert. They defend the essentials: their autonomy, their ethics, and the quality of the care that we will receive tomorrow,” testifies a general practitioner.
For more updates and insights on this developing story, stay tuned to archyde.com. Your voice matters, and we are committed to keeping you informed about the issues that affect you most.
