“A warning shot”, including the fight for “the last chance to save medicine in the countryside”: liberal doctors and biologists are called to close practices and laboratories on Thursday and Friday, some to demand price increases, others to avoid a “plane hit”.
For the first time since 2015, a very broad union front calls for a strike to put pressure on the Executive.
This “historic movement” was started by the young collective “Médicos del mañana”, which in a few weeks gathered nearly 15,000 members on Facebook, a symptom of anger that is spreading among the 110,000 practicing liberals.
They want consultations at 50 euros
With the demand for the doubling of the price of the consultation (from 25 to 50 euros), this group has united the unions to their cause. They see it as a way to influence the open negotiations with Health Insurance for a new agreement for the next five years.
“Fifty euros may seem completely crazy, but it is a point on the horizon to get closer to the European average” for the consultation fee, around 45 euros, argues Jérôme Marty, from UFML.
The rise in prices is presented by the unions as a necessity to create a “shock of attractiveness” towards medicine in the city, crushed by administrative tasks to the detriment of care, and which no longer attracts young people.
Various actions throughout France
A rally is scheduled in Paris near the Ministry of Health this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Twenty actions are also announced in other large cities, in front of health insurance funds, regional health agencies, blood transfusion centers. “Since we are bleeding, let us give our blood,” summarizes Corinne Le Sauder, of the FMF union, in a slogan.
Beyond the economic issue, doctors are concerned about their freedom of installation, which is increasingly questioned, especially in Parliament where bills for medical deserts accumulate. They are winds against the possibility that certain nurses can be authorized to prescribe.
Counterproductive “political solutions”, judges the CSMF. The diagnosis is shared by MG France, for whom the fight against the “loss of sense of the profession” does not “happen neither by coercion nor by contempt”.
Source: BFM TV
