De Gaulle was already amused: "The desire for privilege and the taste for equality, dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times", he wrote. Nothing has changed. Thus our country willingly proclaims its attachment to equal access to care, while firmly maintaining a leaden screed on the data of our health system, which favors some and excludes all the others.
Among these organized and concrete hiding places, there is this one: who, among doctors, is recognized as a very great expert in a discipline, in particular by his peers? Today, for some in France, one or two phone calls can answer them: all you need is to have connections. The general public has no right to know.
Discover our exclusive list of expert doctors
Le Point has decided to break the taboo by producing a list of expert doctors. More than 1,000 practitioners publishing in scientific journals were honored in 14 disciplines, from cardiology to ophthalmology and urology. It is therefore the criterion of the research that we have chosen. Be careful, this obviously does not mean that a doctor who does not publish, or publishes very little, cannot be absolutely excellent! Those we highlight here are established experts in their scientific field and whose opinion is often sought, for example for a second opinion.
We relied on official data from scientific publications, which we then processed, refined, and then confronted with the opinions of leading specialists. The State also uses scientific publications to classify these expert doctors and to allocate each year on this criterion a little more than 1 billion euros in funds for research. But if the funding is public, the ranking is kept secret. To design our list, we were therefore largely inspired by public research methods, in order to get closer to its results.
This investigation is the result of eighteen months of work by a team of journalists. With a lot of spokes in the wheels: the independent evaluation of our health system makes people cringe. No list can certainly claim either to be exhaustive or absolute. But, above all, let no one tell us that everything and everyone is equal, because the followers of omerta do not believe it themselves: when they are directly concerned, they always inquire... And they have the possibility.
This double standard law of silence, we already know it. Our list of hospitals and clinics, which has been authoritative for more than twenty years (hundreds of establishments display it on their premises!) was recently banned by an iniquitous decision by the National Commission for Computing and Liberties (Cnil ), which we are contesting before the Council of State. This prevented us from having access to the PMSI database, which measures hospital activity. And which - too - serves as a criterion for their financing. Here is the same logic again: public funds, information reserved for insiders.
Because there is no doubt that the members of the Cnil, like those of Cesrees, the ministerial body which, out of hostility to the independent evaluation of hospitals, suggested to it the idea of this censorship, will not go into any establishment the day they have a major health problem: they will ask friends in good places.
Fun fact, the Cnil reporter in this case, clearly unfavorable to the Point's record and its autonomy, is also co-founder of Attac. How one can belong to a Marxist movement and not hate one's own privileges.
Nothing new there: in his famous book La Nomenklatura. The privileged in the USSR, Mikhaïl Voslenski mentioned, among the delights of the “Nomenklaturia”, this “other country”, “health resorts, polyclinics and special hospitals”. All in the greatest secrecy. No one was to know.
illustration: dusault for "the point"
