Faced with price reductions imposed by Health Insurance, they promise to mobilize “massive”. Medical analysis laboratories will maintain “almost all” Behind closed doors, from Friday, September 20, until Monday, four days of strike called by the biology unions. “Almost all medical biology laboratories will close”This was confirmed in a joint statement by seven organisations representing the sector, both public and private, including the SNMB and the SDBIO (liberal biologists) and the SNBH (hospital biologists).
“It will be huge. We saw the great leaders, the responsible ones, they all agreed.”François Blanchecotte, president of the SDBIO, stressed on Thursday. He claims to have had an anonymous survey “100% positive responses” for this movement.
Biologists criticize the National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM) for having “betrayed” a conventional three-year agreement (2024-2026) signed in June 2023, and decided during the summer, “without prior consultation” and in “absence of government”to reduce the cost of procedures by 9%, starting on September 11.
The conflict between the CNAM and the unions is due to a demand for biological analyses significantly higher than expected in the first months of 2024 (+ 5.5% in volume). The CNAM intends to maintain the budget allocation planned for the year (3,784 million excluding Covid and certain specific expenses in 2024), which involves reducing certain prices. She says she only wants “respect the terms” of the agreement, “which sets annual allocations”.
Prices will be discussed again in 2025
According to the joint figures provided by both parties, the Health Insurance Company wants to recover around 120 million euros in the last four months of 2024. This means, for biologists, a loss of revenue.
In the absence of a caretaker health minister, biologists have little hope that prices will be corrected quickly, but they call for “a reopening of negotiations”the quiet agreement “on erroneous figures from the Cnam”Blanchecotte said.
For them the situation “endangered” local laboratories and risks causing the closure of fragile sites, staff reductions or even shorter opening hours.
In a letter sent to unions at the end of August, CNAM director Thomas Fatôme recalled that the number of laboratories and sampling sites is increasing, being “from 4,266 at the beginning of January 2023 to 4,421 at the end of May 2024”. Prices “We will try to discuss it again” early 2025 in “function of the observed dynamics”He wrote, not excluding increases if “These were compatible or even necessary” respect the envelope.
