More and more public hospitals are charging for patient parking. A way for them to make up for the lack of money.
Paying for your parking space to get treatment? A reality for a growing number of patients. More and more public hospitals are making users pay for parking to increase their income.
“Profiting from people’s misery”
This is the case at the Pellegrin hospital in Bordeaux, in Gironde. For two months, the parking lot of the establishment has become paying. Jean-Luc and Michèle have to take their daughter there regularly for health reasons. The bill turns out to be salty in the long run, the couple having to pay “15 euros per day”.
“I find that unacceptable”, denounces Michèle at the microphone of BFMTV.
Same speech with another patient who deplores having to pay between 5 and 7 euros for one to two hours of parking. “It’s indecent (…) it’s really taking advantage of people’s misery,” she said.
Hospitals running out of money
The phenomenon is not isolated. A growing number of public hospitals are choosing, for lack of money, to charge their patients, according to an economist.
“It’s a fairly risky and rather losing bet for public hospitals because the income generated is not very significant”, however believes Frédéric Bizard, professor at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP) and economist specializing in health.
Asked about this on the set of BFMTV-RMC, the Minister of Health François Braun said he was aware of the problem, but kicked in touch regarding possible solutions.
“I’m not going to solve the problem of the cost of hospital parking lots. I think our health system has a lot of other difficulties,” he says.
The Pellegrin hospital in Bordeaux explains to BFMTV that it has taken the decision to charge for parking to finance the construction of places, after the expansion of the establishment, equipped with new services.
