[France Culture] Speech by Anne-Laure Feral-Pierssens "Is state medical aid a French peculiarity?
[Summary from the France Culture website]
"L'AME, une aide en voie de disparition?
AME: Aide Médicale d'Etat (State Medical Aid), a free healthcare scheme for foreigners in an irregular situation, is vilified by the right-wing, which intends to do away with it by taking advantage of the immigration bill. "This social protection scheme is aimed at a population that has great difficulty in accessing healthcare. It is 'means-tested', i.e. you have to earn less than 800 euros a month to be eligible," explains Anne-Laure Feral-Pierssens, an emergency doctor and head of the SAMU in Seine-Saint-Denis, who has signed an article in Le Monde calling for this aid to be maintained. In the immigration bill debated today in the Senate, the right-wing has added an amendment to transform this aid into emergency aid, intended for pregnancy-related care, statutory vaccinations and preventive medical examinations.
A system reduced to "urgent" care?
"The main idea is to restrict this aid to "urgent" illnesses. However, it leads us to believe that by abolishing the AME for certain illnesses, we would be abolishing illnesses. This is far from the reality on the ground. Hypertension, diabetes and asthma do not disappear. When you don't have social protection, you forgo treatment and hesitate before consulting a doctor, so these kinds of illnesses can deteriorate and require major treatment later on," stresses Anne-Laure Feral-Pierssens. This distinction between emergency and long-term care is neither relevant nor even coherent from an economic point of view. "Spain, for example, had similar legislation covering the illnesses and care of illegal immigrants. Nevertheless, it went back on it in 2012 by introducing barriers, and some work sometimes shows an increase in mortality. So in 2018, they went back on it," concludes the doctor, insisting on the need to keep the AME."