What Future for Our Healthcare System?
Seance of wednesday 04 june 2025 (Evolution du système de santé)
DOI number : 10.26299/x79x-1106/2025.21.04
Abstract
The primary objective of the French National Health Insurance is to ensure that everyone has access to the best possible care.
Eighty years after the creation of Social Security, can we truly say this goal has been achieved? Beyond remarkable medical and technological progress, is our health insurance system—and our healthcare system as a whole—evolving as rapidly and effectively as it should?
Building a better healthcare system begins with an honest assessment of the successes and failures of the current model.
While the two pillars of medicine are primary care (in the community) and hospital care
(usually as a second resort), both medical training and research remain heavily hospital- centric—if not centered exclusively on university hospitals.
While diagnostic, therapeutic, technological, and organizational innovations are flourishing, continuing medical education is lagging behind—or even missing the mark. While financing should be a positive lever, it often fuels dysfunctions in training, research, and care delivery.
While administration is meant to support healthcare professionals, its growing weight has become a burden, prompting many to question its true utility.
And while patients should be empowered as proactive participants in their own health through prevention, the system continues to prioritize curative, reactive, and consumption-driven care. Grounded in public health, social, and economic data—and guided by a scientific mindset— the new generation of physicians is committed to shaping the healthcare of tomorrow. This evolution requires major transformations in training, research, care delivery, and, most importantly, in how these are governed and funded.
Because patients today don’t just want access to a doctor—they want to be well cared for and to stay healthy.
Eighty years after the creation of Social Security, can we truly say this goal has been achieved? Beyond remarkable medical and technological progress, is our health insurance system—and our healthcare system as a whole—evolving as rapidly and effectively as it should?
Building a better healthcare system begins with an honest assessment of the successes and failures of the current model.
While the two pillars of medicine are primary care (in the community) and hospital care
(usually as a second resort), both medical training and research remain heavily hospital- centric—if not centered exclusively on university hospitals.
While diagnostic, therapeutic, technological, and organizational innovations are flourishing, continuing medical education is lagging behind—or even missing the mark. While financing should be a positive lever, it often fuels dysfunctions in training, research, and care delivery.
While administration is meant to support healthcare professionals, its growing weight has become a burden, prompting many to question its true utility.
And while patients should be empowered as proactive participants in their own health through prevention, the system continues to prioritize curative, reactive, and consumption-driven care. Grounded in public health, social, and economic data—and guided by a scientific mindset— the new generation of physicians is committed to shaping the healthcare of tomorrow. This evolution requires major transformations in training, research, care delivery, and, most importantly, in how these are governed and funded.
Because patients today don’t just want access to a doctor—they want to be well cared for and to stay healthy.