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Regional health agencies (ARS) were created in 2010 from a merger of decentralized state services and regional sickness funds. Since the so-called “yellow vests” crisis, and, above all, the Covid-19 pandemic, they have been on the hot seat. Contrary to administrative engineering analysis, this paper seeks to understand the fragility of this “fake” agencies by re-embedding them in their economic, social and political environments. It emphasizes that the ARS are in a structurally untenable position between the central State, which focuses on budgetary cuts since 2010, and the “territorial” actors that they are responsible for maintaining and steering at a distance. ARS were poorly endowed in human and material resources. They also suffered from budget cuts even though their missions were very broad. This article is therefore the chronicle of the RSA inevitable failure, as they lack the means to meet the expectations of a secularized and politically disenchanted society for which the protection of life has become a sort of replacement ideology.