"Are you sick? Be responsible, stop!"

As a general practitioner since 1984, I have listened to politicians and health authorities spouting forty years of accounting mastery speeches, pitifully draped under the term res-pon-sa-bi-li-zation. Responsibility for caregivers, responsibility for patients, through spending cuts, policing prescriptions, long-term illnesses, and sick leave. With the result we know today, even though everything has been done to hide the extent of the disaster, and its causes, for a good ten years.

Barely had a bill on assisted dying with dignity been passed (with an enforceable right to palliative care that is hard to imagine will be any more effective than the right to housing), and the usual refrains of liberal policies emerged: chronic illnesses, long-term conditions "are in the government's sights" (it should be noted that Macron's communicators at least had the intelligence to erase the word "crosshairs" that they used to use), as well as daily allowances, and therefore sick leave, the increase of which would be unsustainable for the healthcare system, as all the ministers reiterate, even when, like Aurélien Rousseau, they pretend to be on the left.

One of the consequences of this policy is the medical desertification. Many doctors, targeted and harassed over their sick leave prescriptions, become discouraged.