A new confrontation between medical biology laboratories and social security

2024-08-02 15:42:36

Medical biologists are renewing their fight against social security. On Wednesday, the union representing the city’s laboratories denounced the price cuts that the health insurance wants to impose on them, arguing that this will lead to the “disappearance of an important part of the network” of French analytical laboratories.

Biologists will have “no choice” but to close sites, slow labs and cut staff if health insurance goes through with “its catastrophic program,” four union representatives for the industry said in a news release backed by two hospital biologists.

No additional savings required

The source of the impasse is this: the health insurance wants to rein in more than 3.5 billion euros in social security reimbursement costs for medical analyses in 2023. Faced with a surge in municipal health costs, the organization wants to free up 120 million euros based on a reduction in the prices paid to private laboratories for certain operations.

This will be a “fatal blow”, the unions of the sector assure the sector. “We can no longer tolerate such reductions”, assures Jean-Claude Azoulay, president of the National Union of Medical Biologists. Our profit margins are shrinking more and more. ” He recalls that biologists already had to put up with price cuts last year and at the beginning of the year. And ensure that by 2023 17% of laboratories are at a loss.

“We are not asking for additional savings,” declared health insurance chief Thomas Fatôme at “aux Echos”. The demand is simple, to implement the agreement we signed together in July 2023. “After several strikes in the winter of 2022-2023 to protest against financial cuts decided by the administration, the biologists did reach an agreement on health insurance for the summer of 2023.

Renegotiation of Memorandum of Understanding

This “Memorandum of Understanding”, which was supposed to set the rules of the game for the regulation of the social security sector for three years (2024-2026), was welcomed at the time by the camp of professionals, who now demand a “renegotiation as soon as possible”. Biological expenditures are expected to grow by 0.4% per year, implying a price drop of 80 to 90 million euros per year.

However, since the beginning of the year, Social Security’s bio bills have grown far more than expected in the agreement. The health insurance therefore wants to correct the situation with price action. “As we usually do, when sales are slightly higher than expected, prices go down,” defends Thomas Fatôme.

This negates the idea of ​​challenging the 2023 summer agreement from the first year. This would be a “very significant blow” to the system of game-playing negotiation between liberals and health insurance.

The number of analytical laboratories is increasing

Health insurance is also less sensitive to warnings about the financial weakness of the sector. It is concentrated in the hands of a few large groups, especially with the support of investment funds, and has been running at full speed during the corona crisis. In a report published in July, the group assured that the company is “very profitable” and “profit margins are at a high level”.

Health Insurance assures that in the winter of 2022-2023, analytical laboratories had already threatened to reduce their locations, but “since the beginning of 2023, the number of laboratories has been growing regularly”, with almost 4,421 locations identified in the spring of 2024, about 150 more than a year ago.

The organization has already taken steps to implement price cuts for labs by the fall. It remains to be seen whether the absence of the government at this stage will prevent their implementation in the fall. If so, the projected decline in health care spending at the end of the year will be even greater.

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