Public hospitals, affected by a historic deficit, are calling on the executive power this Friday to “significantly” increase their hospitalization rates.
They consider them “obsolete” due in particular to inflation and particularly target full hospitalizations and heavy care.
In a context of constrained finances, the public authorities must soon make their decisions concerning the evolution for 2024 of hospitalization rates covered by Health Insurance, as they do every year.
Current prices “no longer correspond to the reality of care costs” and “no longer make it possible to finance the real activity of hospitals”, deplores the French Hospital Federation (FHF, public hospitals).
“Since 2020, the evolution of prices has not made it possible to cover the increase in the real costs of establishments, which can be explained by the evolution of the typology of patients treated and the dynamics of salary costs”, judges she, estimating that prices have fallen by “9% to 10% since 2020”.
1.6 billion euros cumulative deficit in 2023
In addition to exceptional inflation, the “useful salary increase measures” (Ségur de la Santé measures, increases in public service, increases in night and weekend shifts) have only been partially compensated, argues the FHF.
“Even establishments with dynamic activity are experiencing a deterioration in their financial situation” and the cumulative deficit of establishments “doubled between 2019 and 2022” to reach 1.6 billion euros in 2023.
The executive must “support” in particular the specialties which take care of heavy and complex cases “with overnight stays”, argues the FHF: medicine in full hospitalization, major surgery, critical care and resuscitation.
“The urgency” is also to reduce “the public health debt”.
Between the start of the health crisis in 2020 and the end of 2023, “3.5 million hospital stays in medicine and surgery were not carried out”, particularly for “people over 80 years old, including the number of stays remain 8.9% lower than in 2019,” recalls the federation.
This 2024 pricing campaign has all the makings of an impossible equation.
The executive must distribute the envelope between the public and private sectors, each of which is demanding an increase of around 10%.
But the national health insurance spending objective (Ondam) for the year, adopted with the Social Security budget in the fall, only allows us to hope, according to the Federation of Private Hospitals, for an increase of 3 .2%.
Since then, the Ministry of the Economy has revised its growth forecasts and announced new economic plans.