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People in France to get free health check ups at key ages

France's health minister has proposed free medical consultations for people aged 25, 45, and 65 in order to strengthen the country's 'preventative healthcare system'

Published: 19 September 2022 12:29 CEST
People in France to get free health check ups at key ages
A close-up picture shows a tensiometer in 2012 in northern France, during a medical check-up. (Photo by PHILIPPE HUGUEN / AFP)

France’s Minister of Health, François Braun, announced plans for free, preventative consultations for adults at “key ages”.

The Minister said on Monday that the proposal would be part of the 2022 bill to finance social security and healthcare. 

Braun explained on French radio channel, France Inter, that the key ages were chosen based on specific medical milestones.

The visit at age 25 would involve “updating one’s vaccination schedule, and taking stock of physical activity, as well as possible addictions”, he said.

Braun added that the assessment would also be open to those aged 24 or 26.

The one at age 45 would anticipate “the need for potential screenings”, whether that be for cardiovascular diseases or certain cancers, like those of the breast, cervix and colon. It would also assess, “physical activity and mental health disorders.”

READ MORE: How does healthcare in France compare?

Finally, the consultation at age 65 would focus on the “loss of autonomy”, and would offer screenings for cancer and preventable diseases.

The health minister noted that this measure would “strengthen the prevention component of the French healthcare system” which he considers to be “still far from the mark” when compared to France’s European neighbours. 

“Our country is not good in terms of prevention – we have been saying this for years, but now we have decided to act,” he told France Inter. 

In France, children benefit from regular, free health examinations prior to the age of 16, and after the age of 50, people registered with the public healthcare system receive invitations for specific health screenings, including breast cancer or colorectal cancer.

READ MORE: Assurance maladie: 5 things to know about France’s public healthcare system

However, this is not part of a comprehensive prevention campaign, and those outside of the system do not receive such reminders.

“The people furthest from the health care system are a priority,” explained the health minister on Monday. 

Braun did not specify where the medical visits were set to be conducted, specifically whether they would take place in specific centres or with attending physicians.

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: Macron’s attempts to tame world leaders shows he’s more a thinker than a diplomat

French President Emmanuel Macron's flawed efforts to charm the world's autocratic and populist leaders have previously ended in failure or even humiliation. Taking the Chinese president to the Pyrenees won't change that record, writes John Lichfield.

Published: 7 May 2024 12:06 CEST
OPINION: Macron's attempts to tame world leaders shows he's more a thinker than a diplomat

Emmanuel Macron used to fancy himself as a lion-tamer.

There wasn’t a murderous dictator or mendacious populist that the French President would not try to charm: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayip Erdogan, Victor Orban.

The results, overall, have been poor. Sometimes Macron has been eaten, diplomatically-speaking. Years of trying to smooth-talk Vladimir Putin – with invitations to Versailles and the presidential retreat at Fort Brégancon and the long-table talks in the Kremlin – ended in disillusion and humiliation.

Macron’s attempts to create a blokeish friendship with Boris Johnson ended in cross-Channel exchanges of insults and accusations. His mission to find a core, reasonable Donald Trump ended in the discovery that there was no reasonable Donald Trump, just a self-obsessed, shallow deal-maker or deal-breaker.

And now President Xi Jinping of China. The two presidents and their wives are on an away-day to the French Pyrenees (Tuesday), visiting a region dear to Macron since his childhood.

The first day of Xi’s French state visit in Paris yesterday seems to have produced very little. The Chinese president promised to send no arms to Russia but that is a long-standing promise that he has, technically-speaking, kept.

Xi is reported to have promised to restrict sales to Moscow of “secondary materials” which can be used to make arms. We will see.

The Chinese leader also agreed to support Macron’s call for an “Olympic truce” in Ukraine and elsewhere for the duration of the Paris games in late July and August. Good luck with that.

On the gathering menace of a trade war between the EU and China, no progress was made. As a minimal concession to his French hosts, Xi promised to drop threatened dumping duties on French Cognac and Armagnac sales to China.

Otherwise, Xi said that he could not see a problem. Cheap Chinese-built electric cars and solar panels and steel are swamping the EU market? All the better for the European fight against inflation and global warming.

READ MORE: How ‘Battery Valley’ is changing northern France

Maybe more will be achieved in shirt-sleeves in the Pyrenees today. The Chinese leadership is said to approve of Macron or at least believe that he is useful to them.

Beijing likes the French President’s arguments, renewed in a speech last month, that the EU should become a “strategic” commercial and military power in its own right and not a “vassal” of the United States. The Chinese leadership evidently has no fear of the EU becoming a rival power. It sees Macron’s ideas for a “Europe puissance” as a useful way of dividing the West and weakening the strength of Washington, the dollar and “western values”.

Macron has sometimes encouraged this way of thinking, perhaps accidentally. After his state visit to China last year, he gave a rambling media interview in which he seemed to say that the EU had no interest in being “followers of the US” or defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. He had to amend his words later.

That was Macron at his worst, an ad-lib, stand-up diplomat who ignores advice from the professionals in the Quai d’Orsay. I would argue, however, that the wider Macron argument – the EU must become more powerful or die – is the French President at his best.

Few other politicians in the world think ahead so much as Macron does. Democratic politics is mired in short-termism. Only autocrats like Xi or Putin can afford to think in terms of decades or centuries.

Macron likes to look around corners. He is often a better thinker than he is a diplomat or practical, daily politician.

His core argument – made in his Sorbonne speech last month and an interview with The Economist – is that Europe faces an unprecedented triple threat to its values, its security and its future prosperity.  

The rise of intolerant populist-nationalism threatens the values and institutions implanted in Europe after World War Two. The aggression of Russia and the detachment of the US (not just Donald Trump) threatens Europe’s security. The abandonment of global rules on fair trade – by Joe Biden’s US as well as Xi’s China – threatens to destroy European industry and sources of prosperity.

READ MORE: OPINION – Macron must earn the role of ’21st-century Churchill’

Civilisations, like people, are mortal, Macron says. Unless the EU and the wider democratic Europe (yes, you post-Brexit Britain) address these problems there is a danger that European civilisation (not just the EU experiment) could die.

Exaggerated? Maybe. But the problems are all real. Macron’s solutions are a powerful European defence alliance within Nato and targeted European protectionism and investment for the industries of the future.

The chances of those things being agreed by in time to make a difference are non-existent to small. In France, as elsewhere, these big “strategic” questions scarcely figure in popular concerns in the European election campaign.

Emmanuel Macron has now been president for seven years. His remaining three years in office will be something between disjointed and paralysed.

It is too early to write his political obituary but the Xi visit and the Sorbonne speech offer the likely main components. Macron will, I fear, be remembered as a visionary thinker and flawed diplomat/politician.

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