This is the last text to have been adopted yesterday evening before the holidays of parliamentarians: The amending finance bill for this year.
Among the measures adopted, following an amendment in the Senate of the group Les Républicains: the reallocation of credits to set up a biometric vital card. The idea is that the chip of your vital card will contain data in the future that allow you to be identified (such as fingerprints) with the stated aim of combating fraud.
This decision involves redoing the vital cards. 20 million euros of credits which were planned for programs linked to state medical aid and health protection will be allocated to the system. The leader of the senators Les Républicains Bruno Retailleau had made it a condition for an agreement in a joint joint committee, with an argument also hammered out, on Twitter, by thesenator LR from Bouches-du-Rhône Stéphane Le Rudulier: there would be seven million more vital cards in France than the number of inhabitants.
The two senators say they rely on a report from the General Inspectorate of Finance and the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs. This one exists. The estimate of more than seven million supernumerary cards also, but this report dates from September 2013. However, since then, the estimates have changed significantly.
In October 2019, a report by the parliamentary mission on the fight against social benefits fraud mentioned figures of up to five million excess cards.
A year later, during hearings as part of a parliamentary commission of inquiry in February 2020, an estimate of 2.6 million too many cards was put forward. These figures had been rectified by the Social Security which had specified that the supernumerary Vitale cards (schemes where the number of valid Vitale cards is greater than the number of insured persons) at the end of 2019 were only 609,235 and did not concern the general scheme. Social Security also pointed to the fact that many measures were underway to put an end to the last duplicates
The report from the Social Security Department for 2021 already mentioned only 3,830 excess cards as of December 31, 2021. In June 2022, there were only 3,248 left, indicates the Social Security Department – responsible for all health insurance plans – which specifies at franceinfo what'”surplus of cards was not made up of false cards but essentially the fact of cards lost, then replaced, without the old ones having been deactivated.“
For its part, Health Insurance tells franceinfo that this does not concern the general scheme where there are no more excess cards since 2018. In recent years, the surplus cards were mainly found in certain special regimes such as the Mines regime (linked in particular to the choice not to proceed with the empowerment of the widows of elderly miners so as not to complicate their administrative situation, which may generate duplicate cards), the National Assembly and other small regimes.
Since the early 2000s, a series of measures have been taken to avoid excess cards:
- Vital card opposition list, updated daily qui renders cards declared lost or stolen unusable. Pharmacies are equipped to access this list
- New generation of vital cards with photo: the vital card 2, introduced to avoid the use of the vital card by a different person from the insured.
- Implementation of an inter-scheme portal which avoids the issue of a new card if the old one has not been returned or invalidated. Since 2010, no new vital cards have been issued when there is a change of regime according to the principle “1 insured = 1 single Vitale card”.
Having a vital card does not necessarily mean having open rights that allow support. This therefore It is not because there is a remainder of excess vital cards that these are used for fraudulent purposes.
Two main mechanisms of fraud with the vital card can meet, specifies moreover the Direction of the social security: the derotation of the vital card or the false vital card. However, thehe cases of identity theft through the use of a vital card by a third party concern only a small number of situations due to the very broad coverage of the population by compulsory health insurance.
Regarding the existence of false Vitale cards, Social Security specifies that it “is actually very limited, the managing funds of a health insurance scheme having carried out, since 2019, significant work to improve the reliability of the Vitale card fleet”.
Invited on Thursday August 4, on RTL, to give precise figures on the number of excess cards circulating and the associated potential fraud, the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire replied that “even if there was only one card leading to fraud, this would justify putting in place stricter control measures“.
How can everyone be better informed?
Participate in the consultation initiated as part of the European project De facto on the Make.org platform. Franceinfo is the partner