"What are we going to do? Let these people die with their mouths open?": Doctors raise their voices in the face of Bayrou's lies about sick leave

Skewed sick leave figures thrown into the public domain. In his crusade to achieve €5.5 billion in healthcare savings by 2026, François Bayrou insisted that more than 50% of long-term sick leave was unjustified, a refrain echoed a few days later by Catherine Vautrin, the Minister of Health . However, the summary of the "expenses and income" report The National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM) for 2026, from which this percentage is derived, is much more nuanced: "One-off medical checks on sick leave periods of more than eighteen months have shown that 54% of the sick leave periods affected by these checks were no longer justified, with the possibility of the employee returning to work or being placed on disability status."

In reality, as revealed by APM News (medical press agency), relayed by Libération, only 18,585 sick leave orders were checked, a far cry from the 9 million sick leave orders prescribed each year. Of these 54% of sick leave orders suspected of being complacent, only 12% were considered unfounded and led the medical advisor to authorize a return to work. The remaining 42% "no longer fell under sick leave, but under a disability pension." This has nothing to do, therefore, with a widespread phenomenon of health insurance fraud.