Alexandria, Va. ? The heat wave that fried Europe for three weeks this summer could not have come at a worse time for Frenchmen with heart trouble, emphysema, asthma and other illnesses exacerbated by heat.

Temperatures soared just as millions of French citizens, including hospital workers, headed for the beaches to take their traditional monthlong August holiday.

As a result, finding a hospital bed was nearly impossible, and understaffed emergency rooms were overwhelmed with sick, frail and elderly patients.

Those who did manage to get into the hospital weren’t much better off. French hospitals are forbidden by law from having air conditioning out of fear the ventilation systems will spread disease.

The result: The French Health Ministry claims that the prolonged heat wave has claimed as many as 3,000 lives over the last three weeks, calling it “a genuine epidemic.”

Temperatures topped 104 degrees in Paris, where August temperature usually average 75 degrees. The temperatures have moderated somewhat, but if the thermometer heats up again, the government may have to order hospital staffers back to work — for a treacherous 35-hour week.

The heat wave puts a spotlight on much that is wrong with the French economy, including short government-mandated workweeks, extraordinarily generous and expensive benefits, and political resistance to new technologies.

Jean-Francois Cope, a spokesman for the French government, blamed the previous Socialist government for the 35-hour week that has left French hospitals with insurmountable problems.

“This kind of heat wave, at a time of year when staffing levels are low, can only have dramatic consequences,” he said.

The French imposed a 35-hour workweek in an attempt to create more jobs. The goal was to spread the available work to more people — but without a commensurate cut in pay. The result has been higher prices for French goods and services with continued high unemployment of 9.5 percent.

French workers — like their European partners — have lobbied for and obtained some of the most generous employment benefits in the world, including mandated vacation of at least five weeks a year. In the United States, most workers get just two weeks.

And French unemployment benefits can be even more generous. Jobless benefits can be available for up to four years in France and often include housing subsidies large enough to cover a person’s rent, providing little incentive for laid-off workers to search for new jobs. Those who continue to work pay higher and higher taxes to support those who don’t.

Further, centralized, bureaucratic decision-making about new technologies is prevalent throughout the French economy and its health-care system, most obviously in government delaying or denying new medical technologies and pharmaceuticals to its citizens.

Now we learn that the health-care system is micromanaged by the government, even to the point of determining whether there can be air conditioning in hospitals.

Sophisticated ventilation systems are widely available and in use in the United States that can filter contaminants out of the air. The government may not want to spend the money to air-condition its hospitals, but it should recognize that safe new technologies exist.

However, once a law like this gets on the books, a hospital board can’t vote to install cooling systems, as they could in the United States. Instead in France, it literally takes an act of Parliament.

Such resistance to new technologies — partly because of fear and partly out of protection of the status — will continue to exacerbate the country’s economic problems.

It’s too early to tell if the death toll in France exceeded rates elsewhere in Europe. Those figures aren’t yet available, with the Germans and Italians saying such information is too difficult to gather because heat may be just one factor contributing to a person’s death.

The heat wave’s overloading of France’s sluggish, state-run health-care system is something Congress should remember when it returns from its August recess to debate Medicare reform. Private-sector health-care organizations are more responsive than governmental ones for one major reason: They have to compete in the marketplace.

The French are taking solace, however, in one bit of good news: Winemakers say 2003 has the potential to be a blue-ribbon vintage year because of a perfect combination so far of heat and rain. Millions of sweltering Frenchmen will drink to that.

Grace-Marie Turner is president of the Galen Institute, a research organization focusing on health and tax policy. Her e-mail address is galen@galen.org.