Overweight people do physical exercises as part of their therapy at the thermal baths of Brides-les-Bains (Savoie), April 4, 2013. JEAN-PIERRE CLATOT/AFP
Ten thousand steps and more. The movement finally seemed to be underway. Demanded for years by sports health specialists and patient associations, the financial support for adapted physical activity (APA) was to take a notable step forward on the occasion of the bill to finance the Social Security (PLFSS), presented at the end of September. Without going as far as reimbursement for “sport on prescription” for all chronic illnesses, from which more than 20 million people in France suffer, there was talk of implementing it in the context of cancers and diabetes. Proposed from the summer of 2022 by Health Insurance, the measure would potentially concern 7 million French people suffering from one of these two pathologies, eligible for an APA because they cannot practice independently.
The ace ! after weeks of vagueness and arbitration within the government, it finally tabled a simple amendment on the subject on October 20, then withdrew it before discussion in the National Assembly, provoking an outcry among the specialists in the file, and the first concerned, the patients. The bill was adopted without a vote by the Assembly on November 4, after recourse to 49.3.
“Adapted physical activity sacrificed once again on the altar of Bercy”headlines a press release from the Interassociative Cardio-Metabo-Vascular Collective dated November 9. “We learn with amazement that, for strictly budgetary reasons, this amendment was withdrawn and would not be represented in the Senate due, in particular, to a lack of agreement with complementary insurers”write Doctor Jean-François Thébaut, vice-president of the French Federation of Diabetics, and the co-signatories of the collective, which notably includes the Alliance du cœur and the National Collective of Obese Associations.
“Patient endangerment”
According to them, the blockage came from supplementary health insurance (AMC) – that is, mutual societies, insurance companies and provident institutions. “While they continue to call for preventive health policies, [les AMC] contribute to the failure of a project which finally brought physical activity to the level recommended by all world scientific authorities, and French ones in particular”, accuses the collective. For another source, it is the Ministry of Health and Prevention, much less active in this issue for years than that of sports, which would be at the origin of the decline, having not responded in time on the text of the amendment.
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2023-11-10 15:46:23
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