Social Security: €2.6 billion of top-up cover for Alan, and a tender that smells of trouble

According to Mediapart, documents the site obtained add weight to doubts about the impartiality of the tender, worth €2.6 billion, for supplementary health cover for staff of the Sécurité sociale, France's public social security system. The contract was won by Alan, an insurance start-up publicly backed by President Macron. That is what we know.

The detail of these documents, the reaction of the parties concerned and any follow-up do not appear in the dispatch we have, so we do not presume to settle the question of whether the procedure was lawful. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that everything was done by the book. The basic question would remain: why does a sum like this, funded by contributions and by the pay of public-body employees, become a source of private profit? Supplementary health cover does not fall from the sky. It is financed by labour: that of Social Security staff, and that of the less visible army whose output feeds the contributions. The private insurer inserts itself between that flow and the care, and along the way takes its margin, its overheads and the valuation its shareholders hope for.

This is where the notion of surplus value earns its keep. Wages cover what is needed to reproduce labour power; the surplus created beyond that is the source of profit. When part of the socialised wage bill is handed to a privately owned company, a slice of that circuit becomes an opportunity for accumulation. This is not a matter of one executive's malice; it is a mechanism. Capital seeks solvent outlets, and the state, through public procurement, supplies very comfortable ones, with no commercial risk.

The affair also has its unintended comedy. We are told endlessly about the "disruption" of the start-up that shakes up the old players, yet here it benefits from a contract underwritten by public money and, according to Mediapart, from a visible presidential endorsement. The market "chooses," we are told, as if a tender were a force of nature. This is the usual fetishism: behind the "choice of the market" stand the people who drafted the specifications, the panels, the decision-makers and their connections. It is precisely these people and these criteria that Mediapart's documents invite us to examine.

So we will not say the affair is rigged: that would be asserting more than we know. We will say that, even without any irregularity, a state that organises the privatisation of socialised income for a champion it admires is making a political gesture, not a technical operation. The useful questions are simple: who wrote the criteria, who evaluated the bids, what is the comparative cost for staff and for the community, and what remains of the margin once the care is paid for? Until those answers are public, €2.6 billion remains a very good argument for demanding transparency, and a very poor one for believing in the neutrality of the market.