"We have to stop this madness," Prof. Gabi Barabash, director of the Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv said on Monday in reference to the ongoing medical residents' crisis, adding, "I fear for the fate of the [health] system because I can see the process that our young residents are going through. They are isolated and pushed into a corner." Barabash, who also once served as the director-general (Surgeon General) of Israel's Health Ministry, noted that one of the fundamental problems with the health system in the country's center is having to deal with private doctors getting kickbacks from supplemental insurance plans (from the national HMO's) because these services could be provided in public hospitals as well. "That is my opinion and I do not need to hide it," Barabash said. "We have to deal with it. Everyone knows it, but we continue to ignore the situation." So the beans have been spilled. Although the majority of the public does not want to admit it, and journalists mostly ignore it, major hospital managers are behind the resident doctors' protests as they are unwilling to accept the signed wage agreement for the coming nine years, because it does not include private medical services in public hospitals. According to the plan developed by Prof. Barabash and colleagues who manage hospitals in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, hospitals will offer internal private medical services so that patients can choose which doctors they want to care for them. Funding for the plan is to come from the national health fund's (HMO's) supplemental medical insurance programs, to which almost 75 percent of the population subscribes. Implementation of the private medical services can seriously damage the public health system in Israel, which is mandated by law to offer equal services to all citizens and which schedules doctor appointments for medical treatment based on the degree of urgency and severity of the patient's condition, and not on the patient's extra medical benefits. Private services that Barabash wants hospitals to offer may end up seriously damaging and even eliminating one of Israel's best public services, even though the public health system has its troubles and is in dire need of an overhaul. Deputy Finance Minister Yitzhak Cohen said on Monday that, "In all the meetings we have held with representatives of the residents, they have indicated that their demands have little to do with strengthening the public health system. On the contrary, all that interests them is money, money, money." Cohen expressed bluntly what higher ranking officials in the health system have also felt, not just in peripheral areas, where doctors were granted impressive wage increases in the agreements, but also in the center of the country. It is indeed time to stop the madness and formally acknowledge that the intense, ongoing pressure by residents and interns, even after an agreement was signed to end the doctors' strike, must not force the government to privatize health care in Israel, and it should also not undo the significant wage increase achieved in the last agreement.
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