2023-08-22 06:00:23
Doctors demonstrate in Paris on February 14, 2023, in particular for the revaluation of the consultation fee. GAUTHIER BEDRIGNANS/HANS LUCAS
Doctor Yannick Pacquelet, one of five general practitioners practicing at the Signy-le-Petit (Ardennes) health center, one thousand two hundred inhabitants, “immersed in numbers” a year ago at“arrival of [s]on comptable ». It never really came out: “20%: this is the increase in all our expenses put end to end, reports this 39-year-old doctor. The salaries of secretaries and medical assistants, rent, hardware, software, gas, water, taxes… Inflation is felt at all levels. »
The observation is unanimous among his general practitioner colleagues, but also the three nurses, the two physiotherapists, the podiatrist, the speech therapist, the dentist, the psychologist and the dietician who share his daily life and the 1,000 square meters of this multi-professional structure. where between 4,000 and 5,000 patients are followed each year. The equivalent of four times the population of the village.
After a complicated winter for liberal doctors, marked by the failure of conventional negotiations with Medicare, a succession of bills affecting their profession and an unprecedented strike movement – to which Mr. Pacquelet, non-unionized, has participated – the small core of Ardennes doctors decided, one evening in May, to launch an invitation « not a vision » other professionals in the department. Forty of them connected to bear witness to the same ” Fed up “, he explains, ” race against time “ in the face of an ever-increasing number of patients and, therefore, of this subject which has become a “common concern” : inflation. They were soon sixty, and today, eighty, welded around another calculation: the“adjustment” the consultation fee.
Since the first days of June, these doctors have increased it, on their own initiative, from 25 to 30 euros. “After all, we are the guarantors of care, not reimbursement”argues Mr. Pacquelet, ensuring that his patient population, informed, does not dispute the rest of the charge – “only one patient complained about it, it was not applied to her”. They say they set their price “with tact and moderation” depending on the situation – “not for our patients in difficulty, whom we know well, and not for children either”.
“We will not let it go”
For the others, an additional 5 euros are requested for a so-called basic consultation, while this must be raised this fall to 26.50 euros, under the arbitration rules that came into force for lack of agreement. on the medical convention. By then, the unions representing city medicine hope to have returned to sit down at the negotiating table, facing Medicare, to bring their demands – 30 euros being the figure of “floor”.
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