BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

dedicated employees all their working lives and who identified with Clalit’s lofty mission, to answer the question hanging in the air: “How could this happen within our halls!?” I can’t forget how, during those days, before signing any document, I would hesitate and request the approval of Clalit’s legal counsel, my friend, advocate Amiram Sagiv. It was a forgone conclusion, inside and outside Clalit, that I would be appointed the permanent chair of the sick fund. This assessment reflected my standing in the institution, as well as my past achievements as the medical director in Clalit. But a physician had never stood at the helm of the institution. Days prior to my official appointment. the secretary-general of the Labor Federation Yerucham Meshel called and asked if I would agree to continue serving in an acting capacity. My reply was ‘Absolutely not!’ He backed off. Thus, for the first time in Clalit’s history, a doctor was appointed to direct the sick fund. Not only that. Not only was I a physician, but I had independent ideas and was guided by a mamlachti (‘for the public good’) approach: As director-general of Clalit, I even penned a proposal for a national health insurance law that was contrary to the position of the Labor Federation. My Path in the Halls of Clalit Although the sick fund was a Federation, not a state, institution, my directorial approach was mamlachti: Only the good of the health system and public guided my actions. In the 1950s and 1960s there was opposition, harsh disagreements, and friction between the Ministry of Health and Clalit. During my tenure, as well, there was still opposition from within. Although I could never understand why such opposition existed, and I certainly had no allegiance to it and refused to accept it, I knew my approach was for the good of the health system of the country as a whole. For example, I didn’t hesitate to sign a regional hospitalization agreement with the Ministry of Health in 1981, a reform championed by Minister of Health Eliezer Shostak, from the Likud party, and his director-general Prof. Baruch Modan. Modan came from the leading government-run hospital, the Sheba Medical Center. The agreement opened all hospitals, including Clalit hospitals, to members of all the sick funds. This entailed Clalit giving up to a certain extent the preference its members enjoyed over other patients at Clalit hospitals. The agreement also organized hospitalization nationwide on a regional basis. I declined to sign the agreement until it included a clause that gave every family physician special discretion to hospitalize a patient in any hospital when warranted, and I personally stood firm behind this clause. Nonetheless, signing this agreement was a surprise for the people at the Ministry of Health. This was hardly in keeping with the tradition of opposition relationships and friction between Clalit and the Ministry of Health. When Moshe Soroka was still the general-director of Clalit and I was still the medical director, I made efforts to ignore this clash and to strive for genuine cooperation, matter-of-factly, case by- case. Staff at the government-run hospitals sensed this. Here are several examples of how this was played out: I have already mentioned that my meeting with Prof. Sheba on the eve of the decision to establish the medical school in Haifa took place during a fierce clash between Prof. Sheba and his people at the government hospitals and Soroka and Clalit’s people. Despite this, he honored my request that he mention in the recommendations that a fourth medical school would be established in the Negev. 61 Another example is that Prof. Sheba published an opinion piece in the daily newspaper, Ha’aretz , expressing his opinion against Soroka’s decision to establish the Harzfeld geriatric rehabilitation Hospital in Gedera rather than on the Kaplan hospital campus in Rehovot. From an objective professional standpoint of what might have made a better location, he was correct. In reality,

61 In the subtext, Doron’s effectiveness rested on his demeanor that opened channels and his independence of thought and action, his integrity, which won him respect and credibility and a sympathetic ear in broad circles.

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