Paying to be healthy: it all adds up … Paying for that “electrogarbage”... Comparing prices? Be careful ... Renovating your home? Beware the VAT man ... At least it’s cheaper to drive

-Often in small ways – but it all adds up – health costs to the individual, directly or through top-up insurance, are rising all the time. Last summer the fee for consulting a general practitioner was hiked by €1 to €21, this in return for the medics’ promise to help the cash-strapped Sécu by not prescribing useless antibiotics and by being stricter on arrêts de travail. They were promised a further raise to €23 at the end of this year but are pressing for it to come in sooner. That will cost la Sécu some €400 million a year.
As we’ve noted earlier, the government has been taking more and more pharmaceutical products of the list of those reimbursed by la Sécu, citing their limited medical usefulness. Those wishing to continue using them find they have to pay more. Reader Joan Escott, a fan of Efferalgan vitamin C, has seen the price go up from €1.93 to €3.95. Such rises are easily explained: manufacturers and pharmacists can charge what they like for “over-the-counter” products and seek to compensate for falling sales – and on top of that they carry a higher rate of VAT (5.5% rather than 2.1%) than prescription drugs.

- A few months ago I saw an old television set sitting under a tree in the Jardin Albert 1er in Nice. Someone had dumped it there and so it joined the some two million tons of “electrogarbage” created in France every year (2000 tons in the Nice area). That’s made up of laptops, mobile phones and much else that are replaced and have to be disposed of, sometimes simply by being dumped wherever’s convenient. In varying degrees this “electrogarbage” is an environmental hazard and to finance its systematic disposal since November they carry a special “ecotax” at point of sale: for example, €8 on a large-screen television, €2 on a microwave, 30¢ on a DVD player. Small amounts but, again, it all adds up. Collecting the tax is easy but organising the retrieval of the material concerned – through collection points in stores and elsewhere – is likely to be a cumbersome procedure.

- I sometimes meet proudly savvy people who spend a lot of time prowling those web sites which claim to give you “the best price” by comparing a range of offers – these include sites like fr.kelkoo.com, monsieurprix.com and pricerunner.fr. According to Mediametrie some 8 million French use these sites regularly and they sound a good idea. So why is the national consumer agency – the DGCCRF (La Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des fraudes) – looking into them at the moment? Because they believe that they don’t quite do what they claim. To start with, they’re less objective than you might imagine – and that’s because the companies who appear on screen pay to be there, those who don’t pay aren’t mentioned and these include major suppliers like Ikea, Darty and Conforama who refuse to have anything to do with these sites. And another of their drawbacks: they usually concentrate on price alone without taking into account such added value factors as overall quality of the product, after-sales service and speed of delivery. By all means look at these sites but don’t imagine they’ll always save you money.

- Having some renovation done at your home? Watch out for a possible nasty surprise with the VAT. There’s now a complicated formula applied to calculate the tax on major work on buildings more than two years old. This can mean VAT at 19.6% rather than 5.5%. The essential thing is to find a competent and honest builder and get him to give you a clear idea of what total payment will be involved. This variable rate of VAT is a headache for the professionals but also leaves scope for rolling over their clients.

-Some good news to finish: motor insurance is set to fall this year, mainly as a result of the decline in road accidents. Major insurers will be offering premiums with reductions between 2 and 8%. Around a million drivers in France take to the wheel without insurance and this seems unlikely to change. Sometimes this is due to sheer ignorance – when a driver changes vehicle his new car is not automatically insured and some people don’t know that – but there are many wilful outlaws of the road. The penalty for driving uninsured is a fine of €3750.

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