2023-12-13 16:18:13
By Le Figaro with AFP
Published 8 hours ago, Updated 12 minutes ago
Que Choisir wants new doctors to no longer be able to access “sector 2”, which allows them to charge their patients more than the conventional rate. Vittaya_25 / stock.adobe.com
Access to care is one of the hobbyhorses of the consumer association, which has just filed an appeal for “inaction” in the matter against the government, before the Council of State.
The consumer organization UFC-Que Choisir wants to restrict fee overruns for new doctors, arguing that “uncontrolled development» of these excesses, harmful for access to care. “New doctors should only have the choice between sector 1 with fees without excess, or the Controlled Pricing Practice Option (Optam)» which allows the excess of fees but in a limited form, indicated What to choose in a press release. Furthermore, it is necessary “eliminate public aid to doctors“exceeding fees outside Optam, she estimated. On the other hand, “Social Security must (…) reach a conventional agreement on a basic rate acceptable to independent doctors“, she added.
Access to care is one of the hobbyhorses of the consumer association, which has just filed an appeal for “inaction” in the matter against the government, before the Council of State. What Choisir hopes that new doctors will no longer be able to access the “sector 2”, which allows them to charge their patients more than the conventional rate. Social Security only reimburses these consultations on the basis of the conventional rate, it is up to supplementary health insurance to complete it, fully or not depending on the patient’s coverage.
Increasingly specialists in sector 2
What to choose supports its criticism of fee overruns with a study on three specialties (gynecology, pediatrics, ophthalmology), which shows that the prices of doctors’ consultations in sector 2 tend to be higher and more homogeneous in a given geographical sector, when There are no longer conventional doctors present on site.
The presence of doctors billing at the conventional rate “is systematically the most strongly and significantly correlated factor has a reduction in sector 2 rates at this location», indicates Que Choisir. Conversely, when there are only sector 2 practitioners in a sector, there are rather “an imitation of prices between neighbors» rather than competition, notes the association.
According to statistics from the Ministry of Health, more and more specialists have moved to sector 2, 53% of them in 2022 compared to 42% in 2012. Conversely, the practice is less and less less common among general practitioners, with only 5% using it in 2022 according to the same source. The Controlled Pricing Practice Option (Optam), a form of excess spared by UFC-Que Choisir, allows doctors not to respect conventional fees, except for a portion of their patients who continue to benefit from these prices.
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