BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

To drive the point home about wastage, I once shared in an article in a Clalit periodical how a group of kids once brought their teacher a birthday cake decorated with blue-and-yellow capsules of the antibiotic Achromycin (tetracycline)! It was clear we faced a phenomenon that needed to be reined in because it undermined public health and led to a huge loss in public funding. Therefore, I wanted to introduce this small co-payment on prescriptions to discourage such practices. Just to be clear, the payment had no connection to the cost of a particular drug, unlike the situation today where there are tiered co-payments based on drug cost. Rather it was a symbolic payment to deter wastage. Such an idea had been raised in the past before I took office; but it took time to implement it due to the Federation’s objections. Eventually, and only after repeated attempts, were we able, with difficulty, to get this decision passed. The Federation conducted a donation campaign in the United States, using the sick fund as leverage to urge-convince people to donate to Israel’s health needs. 124 In practice, for years the percentage of the take that Clalit would receive was minuscule, if it received anything at all. Moshe Soroka tried to revolt against this state of affairs. He opened an independent office in Chicago and sent the administrative director of Kaplan Hospital, Zvi Goldwasser, there. The Federation’s general secretary at the time, Mordechai Namir, ordered the office closed immediately. Soroka had no option but to do so, and Clalit’s representative returned to Israel. At the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s, while many Israeli hospitals had embarked on mobilizing donations in the United States, the Federation’s financial reservoirs for underwriting its ongoing operations and for development of Clalit plummeted. Some activities came almost to a standstill. I decided to revolt on this score. I visited America and established a non-profit in New York called Medical Research Foundation for Israel (MEREFDI) which was designed to collect donations for Clalit. 125 I was delighted that Jerry Zilber, a New York attorney who previously had donated to Soroka Hospital, agreed to serve as chair of the new entity. With his help and the help of the Israeli consul in New York, Uri Bar Nir, I succeeded in putting together a management team and setting things in motion. There were a number of reasons - some objective – why the Federation’s donor campaign was beginning to unravel: The younger generations of Jews in America were different from the generation of Jews who had stood at the head of so many American labor unions. They didn’t speak Yiddish; and they were not particularly interested in donating to Israel’s Labor Federation. Perhaps there were other reasons afoot behind the disintegration of the Federation’s campaign. Apparatchiks in the Federation’s campaign machinery charged that the actions of Clalit contributed to the demise of the Federation’s donor drives. This is untrue. For example, in taking the children’s hospital initiative forward, the Federation was not the one who found Irving Schneider. And Schneider most certainly wouldn’t have donated such sums to a Federation donor drive. His interest was specifically in hospitals for children. 126 Conflict of Interest between the Labor Federation and Clalit At the top of the Federation’s priorities stood its own needs as a union to be a robust body in representing the interests of working people, while the interests of Clalit were a secondary component. On the other hand, Clalit was an institution that was almost state-like in size. Moreover, from a management perspective it was mamlachti, statist in approach -- the good of the whole health system being its top priority. Thus, there was a conflict of interest and built-in antagonism between the Federation and Clalit. Labor Federation Fund-raising in the United States and Clalit’s Independent Fundraising Activities

124 See: S. Shvarts, Shvarts S., Health and Zionism, The Univ. of Rochester Press, 2008, pp.249-251. https://boydellandbrewer. com/9781580462792/health-and-zionism/ 125 See also: Chapter 2, p.84 126 See: Chapter 2, Section on Schneider Children’s Hospital, pp. 84ff

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