Nurses demonstrated on Tuesday over pay and conditions

For the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, the protests could not have come at a worst time.

Elections are due in April in which he is expected to run against the incumbent Jacques Chirac, and the last thing he wants is a drawn-out confrontation with a section of society that is held with such widespread respect as the health professions are.

Which is, of course, why they decided to hold their action now, taking up the baton from other public sector employees - the police and the gendarmes - who were themselves bought off by the government after a series of protests at the end of last year.

Indeed, it is a safe bet that a deal will be hammered out fairly soon that will defuse the immediate tension and allow Mr Jospin to enter the election race unimpeded. That is French politics all over.

Institutionalised hypochondria

But the underlying problem of the French health service will not go away so easily. Essentially it boils down to money.

Jospin's government has already made concessions to other unions

France likes to boast of its liberal system of medecine.

What this means is that individuals can set up as private doctors, specialists or nurses in the knowledge that they will be paid a set fee, guaranteed by the national social security fund, the CNAM.

This is the body - independent of government - which takes in insurance contributions from workers and employers, then re-funds each medical service.

A patient with a stomach complaint can see a general practitioner, be referred to a specialist, have tests done at a laboratory, acquire medicines from a pharmacy and finally be operated on in hospital. He will pay for it all up-front, but get most of the money back from the CNAM.

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The problem is that the cost is spiralling because the French are medical junkies.

The very success of the system is an invitation to hypochondria, and the French are third behind only the US and Japan in their consumption of medicines.

Successive attempts to reduce their dependency - for example by promoting the use of generic drugs instead of more expensive brand-names - have failed, and in 2001 expenditure ballooned again by 5.6%. The deficit for that year alone was 1bn euros.

Any initiative to increase the pay of family doctors therefore - and by all accounts they deserve one, as their call-out fee is half what a plumber gets - will only exacerbate the financial crisis.

British patients who crossed the Channel at the end of last week to avail themselves of the French health service were not wrong when they saw it as an exemplar of speed, efficiency and generosity.

But anyone can see it comes at a price.