Prevention is better than cure!
However, prevention in France remains the poor relation.
After warning last week on the insufficiency of prevention in public policies to avoid the loss of autonomy of the elderly, the Court of Auditors drove the point home on Wednesday with a new report denouncing this time the lack of efficiency of the health prevention strategy.
Across three major families of pathologies - cancers, neuro-cardiovascular diseases and diabetes - the financial magistrates note that the results obtained in prevention are
"generally mediocre",
despite a financial effort comparable to that of neighboring countries.
Of these three pathologies, which represent nearly a quarter of Medicare spending, or 50 billion euros, France devotes 15 billion euros to prevention.
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But, in France, medical prevention programs (vaccination and screening), such as health promotion actions,
"suffer from too little support",
observes the court. Thus, organized screenings for the three cancers concerned (cervix, colorectal and breast) have much lower participation rates than that of our neighbors. The court also notes the insufficiency of screening for type 2 diabetes, or nicotine replacement therapy, which only benefits 6.6% of the 13 million adults who smoke daily.
To remedy this, the court recommends encouraging practitioners to do more prevention and to
"increase the share of remuneration based on public health objectives (ROSP) in the remuneration of physicians and increase the weighting of health indicators within it. prevention".
It also advocates tightening the taxation of tobacco prices at European level, relaunching the fight against harmful alcohol consumption by raising taxes and fixing a minimum price, or even imposing maximum levels of sugar, salt and of fat in the composition of industrial foods.