The hospital is close to disintegration, medical deserts are spreading, there is a shortage of health workers. To address these problems in the health sector, Emmanuel Macron issued specific guidelines on January 6, 2023. Frédéric Pierru, CNRS researcher and health policy specialist and sociologist, analyzes the scope of these announcements.
Emmanuel Macron spoke about a “endless crisis”. Is this a one-off crisis or an obsolescence of the system?
A crisis suggests two things: on the one hand it seems to be “exogenous”, in the sense that Covid-19 would have affected a valiant health system; on the other hand, a crisis is, according to the same definition of Hippocratic medicine, a very short period in which the fate of a patient is at stake. This definition has been taken up by economic science: it is the moment of the inversion of an economic cycle. The current crisis is therefore certainly not one. Speak about “Endless Crisis” it makes no sense except to erase past policies from the picture.
This pseudo-crisis refers to two long-term trends: first, it is obsolescence because our healthcare offer was built at a time when acute pathologies dominated. Some, benign, were treated by the family doctor. The others, who are seriously ill, were treated in the hospital. Alas! the epidemiological transition means that our
