Complementary health does not take off. On Thursday, the Department of Social Security announced that Health Insurance coverage for dental care would increase from 70% to 60% effective October 1. And charge mutuals, insurers and pension institutions to offset this reimbursement, estimated at 500 million euros in a full year.
A decision that does not suit them either in substance or in form. “It is not up to the challenges”, declares the president of the Mutualité française, Eric Chenut, criticizing a “unilateral” and “technocratic” measure, which “will not make it possible to support the transformation of the health system, nor to respond to the preventive turn”.
This choice is all the more “incomprehensible” since the Government created a “dialogue commission” at the beginning of the year to prepare a transfer that would initially cost 300 million, he recalls. Eric Chenut has also requested a meeting with François Braun, hoping that the Health Minister will “ask his administration to implement the guidelines that he has set.”
“Contribution Consequences”
But the arbitration has been validated by the Government: the ministry confirmed in a press release the forthcoming “wider coverage of complementary oral care”, up to five hundred million euros. They warn that they will pass it to their rates next year.
“This decision will mechanically have consequences on contributions,” says Marie-Laure Dreyfuss, general delegate of the Technical Center for Social Security Institutions (CTIP). Although she also deplores an “accounting measure” and “without any added value on the level of care and global reimbursement of the insured”. The bill could rise further, depending on ongoing negotiations between Health Insurance and various professions, notably dentists who could sign a new agreement by the end of July.
Health insurance wants to reimburse new prevention actions
The director general of Health Insurance, Thomas Fatôme, for his part, assured on Friday that Health Insurance “has not disassociated itself” from dental care. For him, the transfer of 500 million euros “is part of a broader discussion on the management of preventive dental care.”
“We are willing to invest more in this care” within the framework of the new dialogue agreement with dental surgeons, he said. The health insurance would like to reimburse “more frequent preventive examinations”, especially for children and young people.
That is why he wants to propose the reimbursement of prevention acts that are not reimbursed today, he said. “It is not small, we are talking about potentially hundreds of millions of euros,” said Thomas Fatôme.
Source: BFM TV
