VIDEO. Has the Castex government doubled the hospital budget, as the Prime Minister claimed?

Asked a few days ago about the problem of hospital bed closures, Prime Minister Jean Castex assured on the contrary that he had worked hard. The teams of “L’Oeil du 20 heures” checked, by going through the social security financing plans, which each year set the budgets allocated to health establishments and we have compared them since 2011. Between 2020 and 2022, the budget increased from 84.4 to 95.3 billion euros, or 13% increase under the Jean Castex government, but not doubling, as the Prime Minister claims. The budget has not doubled either since the start of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term (+20%) or even since the election of François Hollande 10 years ago (+28%).

So what was Jean Castex referring to? A member of his cabinet gave us an explanation over the phone.

From 2011 to 2020, the annual growth rate of the hospital’s resources was on average 2.3%. And between 2020 and 2022, the rate has increased to 4.7% on average, so the rate of progress has almost doubled.

A member of the Prime Minister’s Office

at the eye of 8 p.m.

It is therefore not the budget that has doubled, but the average annual growth rate over the period 2020-2022 which has increased twice as fast as over the past ten years.

A “health crisis” effect according to Frédéric Bizard, professor of economics and president of the Health Institute: “It is an increase in the hospital budget which was suffered when the covid arrived and which was rightly allowed by whatever the cost.” “This expense was financed on credit, that is to say that it is not additional permanent means that we gave to the hospital and that we financed by resources, these are exceptional means that have been financed by the deficit”, he says. In total, since the start of Covid-19, if it has not been multiplied by two, the hospital budget has increased by 11 billion euros.

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