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France will impose a five-euro ($5.50) penalty for people who fail to show up for millions of missed doctor’s appointments each year, the prime minister announced Saturday, April 6.

The fine was one of several measures announced by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to help a healthcare system struggling to meet rising demands from an aging and growing population.

“We cannot allow this,” Attal said, referring to the 27 million consultations that the main doctors’ union claims are lost each year due to patients failing to show up.

Attal estimated that the measure could free up between 15 million and 20 million appointments for other patients.

He stated that a law allowing a “mechanism for responsibility” would be presented to parliament and that the government wanted the penalty to begin on January 1.

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Anyone who fails to show up for an appointment or gives less than 24 hours notice will be responsible for paying the fee. It will be up to doctors to determine whether the reason for not showing up was valid enough to avoid the financial penalty.

To address a critical doctor shortage, the prime minister will also seek to increase the number of students who complete high-pressure medical training. He predicted that the number of students entering their second year of medical school would increase from 10,000 per year in 2023 to 12,000 in 2025 and 16,000 in 2027.

Medicine is regarded as one of the most difficult university degrees in France, with up to one-third of students dropping out at the end of their first year. Officials acknowledged that the change may only affect the French health service after 2035 due to the time it takes to train doctors.

Attal told a press briefing that an experiment would begin next year to allow patients to make appointments with some specialists without being referred by a general doctor, as is the current practice.

The proposal was criticized by MG France, the main union for general practitioners, which stated that “it will not solve anything” because there is a shortage of both specialists and generalists. Attal’s advisers stated that action was critical because one of the most common complaints among French voters was a lack of reliable access to doctors.