Presidential: four candidates put health back on the agenda

Europe 1 with AFP 3:26 p.m., March 01, 2022

Four candidates, Anne Hidalgo, Yannick Jadot, Valérie Pécresse and Fabien Roussel, tried on Tuesday to put health back on the agenda of the presidential election campaign by setting out their program, in particular their responses to medical deserts, during a "grand oral" organized by the Mutualité française.

The problem of medical deserts 

"With the pandemic (of Covid-19) and its procession of human tragedies, health has once again become a major subject of public debate, and that's good news", summed up the first to speak, the environmental candidate Yannick Jadot.

Regarding medical deserts, the MEP first wants to review the way of assessing needs by making the Regional Health Agencies (ARS) the "real places for coordinating the supply of care".

But he "assumes to say that the last year of studies like the first two years of exercise, if there is an absolute necessity, there will have to be doctors who go to medical deserts so that the French can be healed".

The LR candidate, Valérie Pécresse, wants to set up a "junior doctor" system with "a year of compulsory internship in general medicine studies in a nursing home or in a group practice", but from 2025, because "we do not change the rules of the game along the way" and in return for a revaluation of the consultation of general practitioners to 30 euros.

The communist candidate, Fabien Roussel, pleaded for the creation of a public drug center and assumed that he wanted to "nationalize Sanofi" which he sharply criticized.

"They are world champions, they distribute dividends, they lay off and they find nothing," he mocked the French laboratory.

Less inequality

Mr. Roussel also insisted on his project to "rebuild a great social security of the 21st century (...) not a great Secu as some evoke it to the government which is nothing more than a basket of care limited and full individualization of charges".

“Making the French women and men live better, and that means less inequality, this is a major challenge for the next five years”, warned the socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo, calling not to evade the presidential debate. .

"If we miss the mark, then everything that could not be settled, neither in this presidential debate nor by our institutions through politics, through civic, social, union commitment unfortunately risks being settled otherwise and if we want to refuse violence, so let's give all its place to the democratic debate that occupies us", she warned.

Four strong candidates in the polls were missing: Jean-Luc Mélenchon (LFI), Marine Le Pen (RN), Eric Zemmour (Reconquest!) and Emmanuel Macron, still not declared a candidate for his own succession.

Christiane Taubira, for her part, indicated on Monday that she would devote her week "to collecting sponsorships".

Candidates will however have another opportunity to develop their health projects, during a "grand oral" scheduled for March 17 by the French Hospital Federation.