The health organization in France has failed. It has failed during the various crises that have hit our health system over the last thirty years. The first was the heatwave of 2003 which caused 14,800 additional deaths in France between August 1 and 20, 2003.
For those who experienced it in the care services, we were distraught and abandoned. All the ills of our system were already there: an insufficient response from the State, the most isolated and fragile people left to their sad fate and an overload of work for already exhausted caregivers.
After this health and human crisis, we were told that this would not happen again, but in the end everything got worse.
A political inability to choose
The Covid crisis has forced caregivers to wear garbage bags, due to lack of anticipation and sovereignty over stocks. Pasteur’s country was not able to produce a national vaccine. For what ? The Court of Auditors, in a report published in 2022, spoke of scattered players, biotechs that are too small, limited manufacturing capacities, insufficient coordination and too little public risk-taking. This is the heart of the French problem: the administrative organization no longer knows how to support and promote the French genius, it only knows how to regulate it.
More than fifteen years after the heatwave of 2003, the system revealed the same anticipation failures during the Covid crisis. For years, we have been making savings without a real plan, we are reducing the capacity to provide care as much as we are increasing standards.
In 2026, when we are experiencing the second heatwave episode in a month, chronic and elderly patients are still the most impacted by the lack of air conditioning in health and medical-social establishments, and the already overwhelmed emergency services.
Corporatist reflexes and administrative prudence
The Court of Auditors also noted in 2024 that the French were having increasing difficulty accessing primary care and that public policies were not efficient. This situation is not just a product of medical demographics. It is also that of a political incapacity to choose. And the absence of choice itself becomes a doctrine: that of immobility.
The case of nursing reform – allowing direct access to a consultation and a prescription by nursing staff – is also revealing. When an ambitious reform is unanimously voted for by parliamentarians, it can still be unraveled by corporatist reflexes and administrative prudence.
However, France has always been a great country of health and innovation. With Ambroise Paré, who revolutionized surgery, Louis Pasteur, who founded modern microbiology and opened the way to vaccination, Léonie Chaptal, who helped to professionalize nursing training, or even Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who participated in the discovery of HIV, she has lastingly offered humanity major advances.
French health greatness
But despite the failure of the State, the territories have never stopped carrying the fight for French health greatness.
In Toulouse, the Oncopole was built on the ruins of AZF, one of the biggest industrial accidents in our recent history. From the destruction was born a campus focused on cancer, research, care, biotechnologies and innovation. In Île-de-France, the takeover of the Montsouris Mutual Institute by the Foch Hospital and the Curie Institute, decided in October 2025, announces the creation of a non-profit group capable of combining medical excellence, research, referral surgery, oncology, innovation and the desire to contribute to the general interest.
In Grenoble, in April 2026, the Grenoble Alpes University Hospital launched the Acapella study, the first in Europe, to evaluate an innovative technology for targeted internal radiotherapy in patients with unresectable pancreatic cancer.
In the Gers, the hospital center is carrying out a 2025-2029 establishment project centered on human, territorial, coordinated and innovative psychiatry. In a country where mental health too often remains the blind spot of public policies, this department can become a laboratory for providing proximity and dignity.
Regain our status as a world leader in health
In Cannes, the town hall created an extra-municipal health commission in 2014, bringing together all local healthcare stakeholders every quarter and thus guaranteeing an innovative and local health democracy. Here then is the French paradox: the State has often failed, but the France of the territories has not given up.
To regain its greatness, France must change its paradigm: no longer consider health as an expense, but as an investment, an essential part of its sovereignty. This requires accepting our current failure, rebuilding the present from its foundations – access to care, valuing caregivers – and aiming, in the medium term, to regain our status as a world leader in health through research and innovation.
The State must no longer be an agent of immobility, producer of standards, but a facilitator, a programmer and a builder. France must once again become a great, healthy nation; it has the human means and, in view of its history, it has the duty.
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