Income of private practitioners and health care supply in France: lessons from empirical analyses.

Summary This article analyzes the impact of health system regulation on physicians' health care supply behavior and how their work fits into the objectives of the French system. Is it possible to reconcile universal and supportive health insurance with a high degree of freedom for private physicians? Results obtained on French data provide a body of evidence scientifically validated by academic publications. They show the importance of the individual preferences of private practitioners in their volume of care and their location, as well as a marked interaction between volumes of care and prices. They exclude that there may be a problem of attractiveness of the private medical profession for financial reasons. They show that the regulation of supply by the number of students admitted to medical studies has had major consequences on income inequalities between generations of doctors. In the current framework where fee-for-service payment is dominant, the management of supply is a narrow path, or rather a challenge, between the plethora of doctors, which leads to losses of efficiency because of induced demand behaviour, and the shortage, which hinders access to care for citizens.