The Minister of Health presented on Monday his objectives for the chronically ill without a doctor. The government hopes to “stabilize” their number, which is constantly increasing, and then reduce it, explained Monday in Créteil François Braun.
In January, Emmanuel Macron had already promised 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.
Many upcoming retirements of generalists
The scale of the forthcoming retirements of GPs is such that “we are in a race to at least stabilize the curve” of the number of ALD patients without an attending physician, “and then reverse it” therefore declared the Minister , visiting the Primary Health Insurance Fund of Val-de-Marne, at the forefront of these efforts towards ALD patients.
In the department of Val-de-Marne, “40% of doctors are over 60 and will retire in the coming years”, recalled François Braun. These doctors “have chronic patients” and “we will have to immediately treat this new flow” of people without a treating doctor.
The National Health Insurance Fund 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 has thus 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.