Vive la R

Across France last week, doctors were trying to make a monkey of the government-controlled health-insurance system. A patient might have nothing more serious than a cut finger, but the doctor would fill in his form showing "grave lacerations, permanent incapacity probable.'' A Paris arrondissement was thrown into uproar by the report of a case of yaws, which proved to be a physician's whimsical entry for la grippe. In many areas, coroners had to invoke police aid to force doctors to make out death certificates--and quite a few were signed "Paul Bacon." Who was Monsieur Bacon? None other than France's Minister of Labor, whose department administers the program.

Reason for the unprofessional shenanigans was an outburst of Gallic wrath against a government decree, effective last week, fixing the fees doctors may charge under the health-insurance scheme. In France, benefits are financed by special taxes on employers and workers, but the government administers the plan. Patients go to a doctor of their own choosing, pay his bill, get him to sign a form that they hand in at a government office to receive 80% reimbursement. But the fees a doctor is allowed to charge, complained France's organized doctors, were set outrageously low: in Paris, $2.60 for a house call and $2 for an office visit; outside Paris, $1.60 and $1.40.

When the schedule was first announced, doctors in many departements went on informal strike. They played hooky from their hospitals and offices or treated only emergency cases. Last week's resistance was described as an "administrative strike" designed to wreck the bureaucratic machinery with implausible diagnoses and impossible claims. So far at least, the patients, who will now have to wait longer for their money while the red tape is unsnarled, have made surprisingly little protest against the doctors' sabotage--like all good Frenchmen, they admire anyone who manages to defy the bureaucracy.

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