The main concept is that a unique and central institution will pay for all medical costs and pensions so as to provide an equal level of coverage to the whole population.

The main advantage is that its negotiating power lowers very significantly the price of medicine and the system covers systematically all expenses without limit (100% coverage for any long term or critical problem such as diabetes or cancer).

However, the abolition of corporations by the Allarde decree, in 1791, put an end to this early system of private professional collective security.

It was nevertheless replaced by the sociétés de secours mutuels, or societies for mutual support, recognized and strictly regulated by the 1835 Humann law.

These sociétés would thereafter be free from administrative control, and were encouraged by the law of 1 April 1898, referred to as the Charte de la mutualité, or Charter of mutuality.

France also had, by the 1900s, the most extensive network of child welfare clinics and free or subsidized milk supplies in the world.

[5] As a result, the French historian Fred Kupferman has called Laval "the father of social security" in France.

[5] During the Second World War, the National Council of the French Resistance adopted plans to create a universal social security program to cover all citizens, regardless of class, in the event that sickness or injury made them unable to work.

In the UK, the first report of the British economist William Beveridge outlined the general principles that would govern the integration and evolution of social security in post-war France.

Indeed, the ordonnances of 4 and 19 April 1945, created a generalized, national social security system similar to that described in Beveridge's plan.

The program of the National Resistance Council had envisioned universal social security, but the régime général, or unified social security program, actually created excluded miners, sailors, farmers, and government employees, all of whom were covered by régimes particuliers, or special administrative bodies.

Finally, the law of 22 May 1946, limited coverage under the unified social security program to employees of the industrial and commercial sectors.

In the following decades, the unified social security program would gradually be extended by various laws: The sickness insurance covers the cost of general medicine and special care and dentures, Pharmaceutical expenses and equipment, analysis and laboratory tests; hospitalization and treatment heavy care facilities, rehabilitation, prenuptial examination vaccinations, tests done in public health programs, and the accommodation and treatment of children or adolescents with disabilities.

However, for those not fulfilling the conditions of membership on a professional basis but residing in France for at least three months in a regular situation, there is universal coverage.

The second component, the creation of an additional free coverage on the behalf of national solidarity, is included in the management of care by health insurance.

In the cases of industrial accident, travel from home, or occupational disease, medical care and vocational rehabilitation are totally taken in charge by social security.