Israel’s health funds struggle to serve North and South – Israel News

Israeli health funds (kupot holim) cannot personally provide some services to cities on the geographic periphery, Israel’s State Comptroller Matanyahu Engleman said in a report released Tuesday.

In Eilat, for example, foundations offer services in just 25 medical specialties, and only four of these (obstetrics, pediatrics, family medicine and optometry) are offered across all foundations, the report says. And this is in a city with a population of more than 57,000 inhabitants.

Of the 32 medical specialties available to residents of Safed, 11 are not offered by those insured by Clalit, which insured about 17.1 thousand people, the report also noted.

In addition, according to the report, in the geographic periphery, many specialties have only one doctor. This means residents have no choice of doctor and cannot change doctors.

This not only discourages competition, but also degrades the level of service residents receive, the report says.

Clalit Medical Services (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The periphery is also likely to be more seriously affected by the Health Ministry’s reform, in which it has stopped recognizing a number of medical schools outside Israel where some Israelis obtain medical degrees.

At the same time, 34% of those who received a license in 2022 in the region are graduates of these schools, in the southern region this figure is 51%, and in the northern region – 63%.

Doctors trained in Israeli institutions are mainly concentrated in Jerusalem, the center of the country, and Haifa.

Doctors per capita

The report also looked at the number of doctors per capita in Israel, noting that projections show that Israel will continue to have fewer doctors per capita than the OECD average. While the OECD average number of doctors per capita remained stable at 3.5 doctors per 1,000 people between 2020 and 2035, projections for Israel show 3.16 doctors per 1,000 people in 2019 and 3.02 in 2035.

Additionally, Israel has the highest percentage of doctors aged 55 and over in the OECD after Italy: 48% of Israeli doctors are over 55 in 2020, compared to the OECD average of 33% in the same year.

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Although the Ministry of Health has plans to increase the number of doctors in the long term, the report notes, in the short and medium term the ministry’s work on this topic is not completed and there is no comprehensive plan with goals and measures. success, the report says.

The comptroller also criticized the Ministry of Health’s data on the number of doctors in the country, saying that the ministry does not have accurate information on the number of doctors.

“Different ministry publications are based on different statistics and represent different numbers of doctors,” the report says.