Psychotrauma care reimbursed: who pays when the state passes the buck?

According to Libération, the bill tabled by Gabrielle Cathala, a deputy from La France insoumise (the radical-left party), was adopted by 152 votes in favour and 2 against, despite an attempt at obstruction by the Rassemblement national (the far-right National Rally). The text sets out to fill the gaps left by the so-called "intégrale" law (France's landmark 2020 law on sexual and gender-based violence) by allowing the funding of psychotrauma care, for minors as well as adults. Libération presents it as the "logical next step" of that law. What the dispatch does not say: the cost of the measure, its timetable, the detail of the care covered, or the fate of the bill in the Senate. We will not make it up.

The underlying question, which is our reading rather than an established fact, is this: who pays when care is not reimbursed?

A victim of sexual violence does not finish paying the day the violence stops. There are the therapy sessions, sometimes for years, and the time taken from work to attend them. When the community does not reimburse, the bill does not vanish. It lands on the household budget, on the mother who gives up her own treatment to pay for her child's, on the sister or friend who holds her hand, on those who simply cannot afford it and wait, alone. Marxist feminists call this social reproduction: the work that puts people back on their feet so they can go back to work, raise children, love. When public policy retreats, that work does not evaporate; it is pushed into households, and above all onto women.

Sexual violence strikes women and children on a massive scale. Leaving care to individuals therefore means making people pay twice: first for the harm, then for the repair. Reimbursing care means recognising that trauma is not a private matter but a social cost, one that should be shared. When Alexandra Kollontai wrote that responsibility for the child passes "from the family to the collective", she was setting out the same logic: what a household cannot bear alone must be carried in common.

What, then, to make of the RN's obstruction? We do not attribute intentions to people, and the dispatch does not detail the arguments put forward. But the gesture speaks for itself: delaying, through procedure, a bill that ends up passed 152 votes to 2 means gaining time at the expense of those who have none to spare. In a chamber, a minute of obstruction costs little. For a victim waiting for reimbursement, it is measured in missed appointments.

A law passed is not yet care delivered. It will take enough psychologists and psychiatrists, reasonable waiting times and lasting funding. Without these, reimbursement will remain a right on paper, and the work of repair will go on resting on the same shoulders. That is where this vote will be judged.