Several hundred taxi drivers began slowing down or blocking traffic at several access points to the Lyon metropolitan area on Monday morning, to protest against the agreement currently being negotiated with the Health Insurance for the transport of seated patients, according to the Rhone prefecture.
The drivers are protesting against a new reduction in the price of medical transport and an obligation to use "taxi sharing" proposed by the National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM).
"Not only will we wait a very long time to fill the car, we will make endless rounds, but we will also deteriorate the service that we have been providing for years with patients," Abdel Green, president of the Federation of Independent Taxis of the Rhone (FTI69), explained to AFP.
"The patient is not a guy you take to the airport or to a nightclub or to the hairdresser. He is someone who is impatiently waiting for you because you are perhaps the only person he sees during the week and it is an outing for him. He tells you about his little aches and pains, he talks to you about his little family, you take him to the hospital, sometimes you even help him get dressed when he is discharged from hospital," adds the manager.
"That's what bothers us, much more than the fact that they want us to drive at 0.98 cents per kilometer instead of 1.67 euros. It's a loss of purchasing power. They're just comparing us to parcel carriers. Except that we're transporting humans," he argues.
At a roundabout on the northern ring road of Lyon, around 150 taxis with their hazard lights on were parked in single file, without completely blocking traffic. Some were displaying signs saying "taxis on strike" or "medical taxi in danger", an AFP journalist noted.
For Nicolas Galliot, 43, a taxi driver in Clermont-Ferrand and boss, medical transport represents 60 to 70% of his turnover.
If this agreement passes, "it will be to the detriment of my employees, the value of our licenses, but especially of the patients." Grouping patients in a shared taxi is "parking them like cattle," he says. "We will lose the human side of our profession," he worries.
According to a report at 08:15, the prefecture of the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region noted a "very disrupted" situation on the motorway entrances to the Lyon metropolitan area, with four blockages and a go-slow operation in Villefranche-sur-Saône, and slowdowns at the Saint-Quentin-Fallavier toll.
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