The Senate dominated by the right-wing opposition begins Monday, after the National Assembly, a week of examination of the draft budget of the Social Security for 2022, the last of the five-year term, in a context marked once again by a difficult situation. the hospital.

The first reading examination of the Social Security financing bill is due to end on Tuesday, November 16 with a vote on the entire text.

More than 1,000 amendments have been tabled.

Weighing more than 500 billion euros, this budget anticipates at this stage a deficit of 21.6 billion euros for 2022, much less than the two previous years, thanks to the effects of growth.

Some five billion remain provisioned to deal with the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis.

"No savings will be made on the back of the public hospital", promised the Minister of Health Olivier Véran.

But the lack of nursing staff and the resulting bed closures will weigh heavily in the debates.

At the end of two years marked by the Covid-19 crisis, the senatorial majority is worried about the absence in the draft budget of "a strategy to return to balance" of the social accounts.

"A structural debt crisis"

“We went from a health crisis to a structural debt crisis,” said General Rapporteur Elisabeth Doineau (centrist). It thus proposes the rejection of the multiannual financial trajectory of Social Security "which fatalistically presents a deficit" plateau "of around fifteen billion euros by 2025". With a certain constancy, the senatorial right also proposes to make carry by the general budget of the State the financing of the investment plan for the hospital and the budget of Public Health France. Likewise, it wishes to increase the exceptional contribution of mutuals from 500 million to one billion euros.

The senatorial majority also remains constant on the urgency of restoring the accounts of the old age branch, a file whose political dimension grows as the electoral deadlines approach.

This time, it is putting on the table a gradual postponement of the opening age of retirement rights to 64 years from the 1966 generation. It would be coupled with the acceleration of the implementation of the Touraine reform of 2014. on the number of quarters worked.

Autonomy: "enormous needs"

On the left, the Communist-majority CRCE group will propose, with little chance of success, to reject the text as a whole, believing that it does not take the measure of the crisis.


Socialist senators will be more particularly interested in the autonomy branch, the youngest, and will make proposals to "open new avenues of funding". "We owe it to the elderly", pleads their leader on this text, Bernard Jomier.

On this aspect, the Deputy Minister Brigitte Bourguignon calls for a “systemic reform” with a “domiciliary shift” to allow the elderly to stay at home as long as possible.

The text notably includes the introduction of a national "floor rate" of 22 euros per hour of intervention by home help services in 2022. LR chairwoman of the Social Affairs Commission Catherine Deroche considers that "there is has measures that are welcome, even if that seems insufficient ”.

Ophthalmics can't see it clearly

Elisabeth Doineau is more severe, deploring the lack of "awareness of the enormous needs in this sector". The PLFSS includes several articles aimed at facilitating direct access to several paramedical professions, including orthoptists, who may prescribe glasses. Measures against which were protested in a letter addressed to parliamentarians the Order of Physicians and six unions of liberal practitioners.

In an attempt to calm things down on the side of ophthalmos, the Social Affairs committee will propose that the application decrees, which will notably set age criteria for the patients concerned, be taken after the opinion of the National Professional Council of Ophthalmology.

The text also includes a number of provisions "which do not fall under the PLFSS", noted Catherine Deroche, who has already announced a future referral to the Constitutional Council.

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