The failure of the fight against the financialization of medical biology laboratories
Type de matériel :
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Private medical biology laboratories (LBMs) occupy a key position in the French health care system: they contribute to nearly 70 percent of medical diagnoses and performed nearly 85 percent of PCR tests during the COVID-19 pandemic. The recent history of this sector shows particularly intense and dazzling transformations: a vast movement of concentration has drastically reduced the number of laboratory companies; the sector is also largely industrialized due to the development of vast technical platforms; and finally, a process of financialization, illustrated by the large-scale acquisitions of laboratories for the benefit of private equity players, has been at work since the early 2000s. This article focuses on this movement of financialization and more specifically on the set of anti-financialization measures introduced by the 2013 medical biology law, in order to understand and analyze the reasons for their failure. To this end, the historical context of the sector in which this law was introduced is described; an analysis of the main tools is carried out, and an attempt is made to show their limits; finally, the article briefly reviews the main effects of the phenomenon of financialization in the sector, which were particularly visible during the health crisis.
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