Everything was settled by the French health service and our top-up insurer.An epidemic of the same virus is raging once again among Parisian newborns. Exceptionally, there are also also epidemics of influenza and gastroenteritis among children and teenagers. This time around, the French health service – declared by the World Health Organisation to be the best in the world – is not coping so well.Parents with sick children (although not the youngest or sickest) had to wait for up to 12 hours for treatment at Parisian casualty wards the weekend before last. Some patients had to be transferred as far away as Lille, 140 miles to the north.

There were problems again in Paris at the weekend but they were less severe (a three-hour maximum waiting time). Many GP’s and paediatricians, who had closed their surgeries en masse the previous weekend, stayed on duty this time to help to treat the triple epidemic.Nonetheless, four months after the failure of the French medical and emergency system to cope with the August heatwave, which killed 14,800 old people, the new crisis poses awkward questions about what is, by British standards, a lavishly equipped service. France has nine hospital beds for every 1,000 people, compared to 4.9 in the UK. The publicly-funded health service in France costs £85bn a year, compared to around £65bn in Britain (which has roughly the same population).The French service remains, in many ways, excellent.

If you know how to play the system – and you take care not to fall ill at weekends or during the August holidays – it offers choice, flexibility, rapid response, coverage for all, excellent care and generous provision. And yet the French health service – sometimes held out as a model for Britain – is not only beginning to fail some of its patients. It is heading for a financial catastrophe.The health section of the social security budget will be €10.6bn (£7.4bn) in the red this year, making a large contribution to France’s embarrassing failure to respect the deficit rules in euroland.A committee of politicians, doctors, unions and employers will report on the future of the health system in two weeks. A preliminary report last week warned that the deficit would rise to €100bn a year by the year 2020 – sinking the French economy – unless radical measures are taken to restrain costs.Health service reforms, in other words cuts, are supposed to be the centrepiece of the parliamentary programme of the centre-right government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin in the New Year. The weaknesses in the system exposed in the past four months will not make the government’s task easier How can an increasingly unpopular M.

Raffarin cut the health service when it is failing the old and now failing the young?The French, like the British and everyone else, are struggling to answer an unanswerable question. How do you keep health spending down when the complexity of medical care, the age of the population, and the level of public expectations, are constantly increasing? There are, however, more local explanations for the abrupt difficulties of a French health service that seemed to have endless resources when my daughter fell ill only six years ago.Firstly, the 35-hour working week, introduced, by the last, Socialist-led government has had a devastating effect on hospitals. New jobs have been created but it has been impossible to find the trained nursing and auxiliary staff to fill them.The crisis in the past two weekends was not caused by a physical shortage of beds. Dozens of wards were closed because there was insufficient staff.