BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

means, I brought Poalei Agudat Yisrael under the Clalit umbrella. 132 There were also agreements for new immigrants, and these were handled by Israeli diplomats abroad as part of a person’s preparations for making aliyah . At one point Clalit covered 85 percent of the insured persons in the State of Israel. Over the years, the other sick funds also grew. The Netanyahu Commission recommended insurance for 100 percent. This was a fine accomplishment. One of the topics I emphasized in my testimony before the Commission, and that the Commission itself recommended, was addressing all stages of health of the population including preventive medicine, medical treatment in the community, general hospitalization, specialized hospitalization, and rehabilitation. The Netanyahu Commission stated that the Ministry of Health must stop functioning as a service provider. Its role should be to serve in a supervisory role, to set policy, to plan, to oversee, inspect, and control the performance and quality of the operations of the service providers. I identified completely with this conclusion. There wasn’t an interview on radio during my tenure as medical director and director-general of Clalit where I didn’t argue that the role of the Ministry of Health as an operator of medical services stood in contradiction to its roles governing and supervising all health services in Israel. I felt that the Ministry of Health could not properly carry out its primary oversight functions while at the same time operating government hospitals, services for new mothers and infants that were delivered in Tipat Halav (literally, Drop of Milk) clinics, and preventive medicine services. My predecessor, Dr. Tova Yeshurun Berman argued that personalized services of preventive medicine, and monitoring of pregnant women and newborns should not be separated from the rest of the services of the sick funds. For years, I, too, fought for integration between these functions. For example, I saw no justification that in Ofakim, a tiny development town in the Negev, there would be a pediatric clinic run by Clalit and also Tipat Halav services run by the Ministry of Health. The absurdity of this state of affairs was reflected in a directive penned by the chief supervisor of nursing at the Ministry of Health ordering that Ministry of Health nurses refuse to make coffee for Clalit nurses under the same roof! While there had always been Tipat Halav clinics run by Clalit, the Ministry of Health saw to it that their numbers wouldn’t grow. In my opinion, such a situation ran counter to the medical and economic interests of the health system. To this day, however, and despite the Netanyahu Commission’s recommendation, the Ministry of Health continues to function as a health services provider. The Commission proposed that the country be divided into five or six regions, with regional sick funds. I took issue with such a concept. I had always been a proponent of regional organization of health services and had put that into the draft legislation I formulated together with Joseph Ciechanover. But I strongly disagreed with this proposal to divide the sick funds according to region, where each region would have its own separate sick fund as a service provider. Among the Commission’s recommendations was free transfer between sick funds and that all the sick funds would have to accept any insured person who wanted to move from one sick fund to another. In fact, I had already instituted free movement between clinics at Clalit which did not require changing sick funds: There was a time when people were assigned to one clinic only. Then later, they could choose between three clinics; but I set in motion unfettered movement between clinics and the ability to receive medical assistance in the community at any Clalit clinic and from any doctor one preferred.

132 Poalei Agudat Israel , in Hebrew, or PAGI (Workers of the Union of Israel), is a Jewish political party of ultra- Orthodox (haredi) workers that had a socialist bent. Initially, it was a faction of the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel (Union of Israel) party sometimes in the past called ‘the Aguda’. PAGI was tied to the Federation of Labor by special arrangement. Under the agreement, PAGI’s members were eligible for membership in Clalit.

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