PARIS (Reuters) – Prime Minister François Bayrou said on Saturday that he had agreed to “rework” the measures to be taken to save on the new agreement governing the transport of patients by taxis, after a meeting with certain representatives of the profession at the Ministry of Transport.
The project of new pricing of the transport of patients has the anger of taxis drivers, who have been demonstrating for several days in France.
“We agreed to say that we had to save money. We will rework in the coming weeks of the decisions, measures and guidelines that must be taken,” said François Bayrou to the press, adding that these discussions were going to begin “on Tuesday”.
“We noted a real change of method, the Prime Minister established a work calendar, he did not put any taboo whatsoever for the Convention. He said that all the blocking points will be able to be taken up,” welcomed the Rachid Boudjema meeting, president of the National Taxis Union.
The Prime Minister excluded to change the date of application of the new convention which is to enter into force in October, as well as the “objective encrypted at some 150 million euros out of the 3 billion”.
The transport of patients costs health insurance 6.74 billion euros including 3 billion for taxis, a figure up 45% since 2019. For certain taxis, especially in small cities, it represents a very large part of the turnover.
Health insurance intends to set up an care package and kilometric pricing per department. She wants to stop funding vacuum feedback and generalizing shared transport.
Taxis drivers also denounce the unfair competition that the VTC (transport cars with driver) would oppose them. To this complaint, François Bayrou also said he was open to discussion.
“There is a very great disorder with the taxis and the rules which are imposed on them and the VTC platforms which do not respect the same rules and which do not pay taxes and do not provide charges because they are based abroad,” said the Prime Minister.
(Zhifan Liu)
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