2023-06-07 04:30:00
Lhe “Amazon” medicine is well and truly arriving in France. In addition to your Netflix subscription, will you soon have the “doctor” subscription? It’s in the air. Like the American logistics giant, the number one private healthcare provider, Ramsay, is launching an unprecedented subscription offer for teleconsulting doctors.
“With a subscription at 11.90 euros per month, you can teleconsult a doctor whenever you need it, all costs included”, writes Ramsay Services to describe this offer called “24/7”, in reference to the slots of unlimited opening hours, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
READ ALSOTelemedicine: 6 applications that change the lives of patients “Once the subscription has been taken out, no additional cost and no fee-for-service billing will be required, all your teleconsultations are included in your monthly plan”, adds Ramsay. In detail, once the subscription has been taken out, the teleconsultation with the doctor can be done “directly by telephone or from your computer. Following the online consultation, your medical documents will be sent to you by e-mail and accessible from a secure link.
A response to “medical deserts”?
Like the major communications operators, such as Netflix or Canal Plus, Ramsay Services offers the customer the opportunity to “take a look at everything [son] subscription includes; more than twenty medical specialties represented: general practitioners, gynecologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, pharmacists, nurses. No filters, middlemen or waiting times”.
And also plays the “tricolor” card by specifying that “100% of doctors and paramedical professionals are graduates in France and registered with the Council of the Order of Physicians or the order of their profession”. However, the operator adds in the “general conditions of sale” that the number of calls to the teleconsultation service “cannot exceed a reasonable number, ie 20 per year”.
READ ALSOList of expert doctors: the survey that guides youThis offer is actually the effect of a bomb in a medical world entangled in its contradictions. The “medical deserts” are progressing, the unions of liberal doctors do not want to hear regarding regulation of the installation, and the public authorities have the greatest difficulty in trying to organize it.
Deputy Valletoux’s bill, currently under discussion in committee in Parliament, and which will be examined next week, proposes to toughen the conditions for the exercise of on-call duty for doctors, but it is arousing very strong opposition from of practitioners who already consider themselves overwhelmed. In this blocked context, which adds to the perpetual crisis of the hospital, the operator Ramsay tries to interfere in the breach to meet a real demand from the public, who are tired of not being able to find doctors available.
“The consequence of the decay of the system”
If proposals in telemedicine are already emerging, and are progressing, there was none of a comparable scale, and especially carried by one of the largest operators of the health system. At 11.90 euros per month, this therefore represents an annual subscription of 142.80 euros, an “unlimited” offer which will strongly compete with a medical sector in turmoil.
Critics, expected, were quick, left and right. “Do we have to pay to have access to care? The multinational Ramsay unveils a very special subscription for access to video consultations. An unprecedented attack on equality in the face of care”, protests the collective Our public services.
READ ALSOAccess to care for all, a threatened right? For Doctor Jérôme Marty, President of the French Union for Free Medicine, “it is regarding the arrival of the Netflix of medicine. But, for a family of four, it will cost him 571 euros per year! It is the consequence of the decay of the system, and it illustrates the failure of our leaders. Doctors throw themselves into the arms of this type of structure, because they no longer have the means to work properly”.
In fact, medical teleconsultations, offered by this type of platform, are reimbursed by Health Insurance, but the subscription itself to benefit from Ramsay’s services is the responsibility of the customer. The development of teleconsultation is obviously a reality. Until now, practitioners might not devote more than 20% of their activity to it.
But Emmanuel Macron hinted that this provision might be relaxed as part of the ongoing reflection on the supply of care. Ramsay’s “doctor’s subscription” is also part of this perspective. By dint of failing to organize itself, the French health system is coming to such types of upheavals.
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