Privatization in French Health Politics: Few Projects and Little Outcome

Abstract

The author presents the main features of the organization of the French health care system, revealing an important mixture of public and private actors and institutions and a large number of political restraints that oppose resistance to privatization. In spite of traditional references to “liberal medicine” and recurrent debates opposing public and private intervention, neither the doctors nor the political decision makers have really supported the few projects that have been proposed for privatization or liberalization of health care. On the contrary, the cost-control policy introduced growing State intervention and new management methods into the health care sector, whose actors were not used to it. The privatization and liberalization debates appear as a rhetoric necessary to accommodate these difficult changes.