Until the first round of the presidential election, on April 10, the “True of the False” sifts through the statements of the candidates on the major themes of public debate. Wednesday April 6: health, with Yannick Jadot, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
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After two years of pandemic, the issue of health is one of the central themes of this presidential campaign. The candidates have different proposals to reform the health system. They also have arguments against their adversary’s plans. The True of False Unit sifts through three statements.
“There are 8 million French people who do not have access to a doctor”
Rather wrong. This is one of Yannick Jadot’s arguments to denounce the medical deserts and the remoteness of part of the French population from the main public services. The figure that comes closest to the estimate of the candidate ecologist is in a study published last year by the French Mutuality. She claims thatin 2018, 7.4 million French people live in a municipality where access to a general practitioner is “potentially limited”, that is to say with an average of up to 2.5 general medicine consultations each year. Another study, conducted this time by the statistics service of the Ministry of Health, explained that for the same year 2018, problems of access to a general practitioner concerned rather 3.8 million French people.
“Do the French know that Emmanuel Macron has cut 5,700 hospital beds?”
Rather true for Nicolas Dupont-Aignan. In 2020, according to still provisional data, 5,803 beds were eliminated in full hospitalization, according to Drees. There are three main explanations for understanding this figure. First, the drop in the number of beds in 2020 is part of a long trend to develop outpatient care, that is to say going out during the day just after a surgical operation, for example. This figure is also explained by the lack of personnel. And then, during the epidemic, it was necessary in particular to transform double rooms or rooms with a single bed to limit contamination.
“13 departments without gynecologists in France”
Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen take the same shortcut. There are actually 13 French departments that do not have medical gynecologists. But what the candidate of La France insoumise or the candidate of the National Rally does not say is that women also have access to obstetrician-gynecologists, who are much more numerous and present in all departments. In addition, general practitioners and midwives also contribute to monitoring women throughout their lives.