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The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the strengths and weaknesses of our health care system. Its strengths: the financial solidarity provided by the social security scheme, and the quality of its professionals. Its weaknesses: our historical deficiency in public health (insufficient prevention and social inequalities in health); the lack of organization (insufficient multi-professional teamwork, insufficient coordination between communities and hospitals); the under-funding of research; medicine being applied to an industrial, commercial, globalized vision; the inflation of a bureaucracy far removed from the field; promoting management by standards and by numbers; and the lack of health democracy. The epidemic has brought to light the crisis in public hospitals that health care professionals have been speaking out about for months and years. Public hospitals are indeed victims of a policy of austerity, of a commercial management style, and of the delay in building a community medicine that serves the public. The first wave showed what a public service looks like in which professionals work together to serve patients and in which managers serve health care professionals, not the other way around. But will the lesson be learned? This would mean changing the way the budget is determined, reviewing the methods of financing institutions and remunerating professionals, and replacing neo-management with co-management between administrators and professionals, with the participation of care users.