Healthcare professionals who exercise private activity will be able to collectively negotiate their salary conditions with insurance companies and hospital groups through the professional associations that represent them. The National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) has confirmed that the European Commission’s guidelines on the application of competition law to the working conditions of the self-employed are applicable to doctors who do not have employees.
This implies opening a door to the negotiation of collective agreements between self-employed doctors and insurance companies “with the guarantee that they will not be subject to intervention by Competencia, as long as the objective is to improve conditions remuneration of professionals”, indicates the Council of Medical Associations of Catalonia. For years, this organization has led the demand for instruments so that the self-employed can negotiate rates with the companies.
Insurance companies and hospital groups had refused to bargain collectively with doctors, arguing that this would violate competition law. However, the CNMC rules that there is no impediment to collective bargaining under certain conditions (when the insurance company or hospital group has an annual turnover of at least 2 million euros or more of ten employees), which the vast majority of private doctors meet.
For years there has been no dialogue between professionals and the insurance companies, in the midst of a price war between companies that are selling “unworthy policies to citizens and remunerating doctors unworthy. There are companies that are paying less than 10 euros per medical procedure, and this is unsustainable”, explains Jaume Padrós, president of the College of Doctors of Barcelona, ??an organization that includes 10,000 doctors from the private insurance sector. “We are satisfied because it is a great victory, a turning point that affects a significant percentage of doctors in Catalonia and allows us to continue working so that it can be extended to the rest. We need doctors to be able to be grouped together to defend their interests”, he added.
According to Padrós, the clarification of the rules of the game should promote an increase in the level of satisfaction of professionals and the quality of the sector for the benefit of citizens. At the same time, it must be assumed that the dignification of fees will mean the disappearance of health insurance at unforgiving prices, with services far from the expectations of customers and a lot of small print.
The CNMC is conducting a study on the conditions of competition in the insurance sector and healthcare services in Spain. The associations of Catalan doctors trust that the conclusions of this study “will go in the direction of consolidating, and even expanding, the margins that must allow the entire group of self-employed doctors to negotiate fair conditions, whether they have employees or not”.
