On 5 May 2025, France’s ministers for health, finance, accounts, public services and industry jointly signed a letter to Virginie Beaumeunier, President of the Comité économique des produits de santé (CEPS), setting out urgent priorities for the committee as the government’s adviser on pricing and reimbursement of medicines and medical devices. The document’s main focus is to respond to recent demographic, epidemiological and economic pressures and to reinforce the resilience, innovation, and sustainability of France’s health system.
The letter, entitled "Ministerial guidance letter to the President of the CEPS" (“Lettre d’orientation ministérielle du 05 Mai 2025 au CEPS”), begins by signalling that successive shocks—including rising chronic illness, obesity, ageing, mental health conditions, and cancer—have exposed limits in the French system’s ability to fund access to new technologies and essential products. The ministers say the CEPS must drive a new, pan-ministerial ambition for rapid patient access, retention of breakthrough treatments, and support for European supply chains.
The committee’s duties are now centred on both price moderation and market resilience. Citing persistent deficits across national social insurance, the ministers frame price controls on new medicines and further price reductions as necessary interventions: not simply for cost savings, but to protect innovation and preserve the quality and reach of care. The CEPS is told to focus saving efforts on products and services with the highest or fastest-growing reimbursement costs. It is expected to account for the strategic risk of depending on non-EU suppliers, ensuring secure supplies of vital products by supporting European manufacturing and asking companies for transparent, reliable price data.
The letter tasks the CEPS with negotiating a new framework for drug pricing, replacing the 2021 agreement, to clarify and simplify how prices are set and revised. Priorities annexed to the letter include proposals for new hybrid pricing models, practical use of medico-economic opinions to justify price levels, mechanisms for supply security especially for essential products, and financial incentives for strategic investments in manufacturing. Strategic environmental sustainability will also be incorporated.
CEPS is asked to fast-track review processes, propose new governance measures, and draw from recent pilots of direct access models. Summer 2025 is set as a target for submitting process improvement proposals, informed by data from recent experiments.
The new mandate, effective immediately, aims to align public spending, robust supply, rapid innovation uptake, and market transparency, with regular progress reporting to all relevant departments. The expected impact includes more predictable pricing decisions, better supply security, prioritisation for evidence-backed innovation—and a rebalancing of budget costs and industrial investment incentives over the coming year.
English: Ministerial guidance letter of 5 May 2025 to the CEPS
Date: 5 May 2025
