“The Israeli health care system has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to innovate, improve, establish goals, be tenacious and prioritize – all of which have enabled it to achieve good health outcomes with limited resources.”
– World Health Organization Report
Compared to the rest of the world, Israelis are healthy and the statistics compare quite favorably with those of other developed countries. According to the World Bank, since 1990 Israel’s population has almost doubled while life expectancy has jumped from 77 to 83 years and the infant mortality rate has dropped by almost 67 percent.
Healthy overall, but at the same time health is one of those quirky equalizers that cuts across every social barrier and reduces identifiable groups to mere individuals. No matter where you go in the world a hospital is where life begins, where life is cared for when it goes wrong, and for many, where life ends. Like their counterparts around the globe, Israeli hospitals work on the same general principle of rendering the best health care they can to save and preserve life.
It boils down to when you are sick, all you want is to get better.
Israel is no different in that sense, but outside of hearing that there is “national health care” or that it is another country with “socialized medicine,” just how does Israel’s national health care system work?
The answer is it works quite well. Israel’s health care also has its pluses and minuses. For example, some of its hospitals have international reputations despite issues of underfunding and overcrowding coupled with overworked staff. That puts Israel on par with a lot of countries.
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How Israeli Health Care Works
By law, all Israelis have health care and choose from one of four national health providers (in Hebrew called Kupot Holim). While there are some minor usage charges, coverage is universal and includes free dental care for children, seniors and special needs groups.
The health care system ranges from nurses in public schools to your family doctor, getting referrals to specialists, to going to a local clinic or specialized clinics like infant care and physiotherapy, and at the upper end the big hospitals with emergency wards, intensive care units and departments for every branch of medicine.
Israelis use the local equivalent of 911 and dial 101 for an ambulance (100 for police and 102 for fire). The Magen David Adom (Red Star of David, which joined the international Red Cross Movement in 2006) is the national medical first-response organization with ambulances and mobile intensive-care-units staffed by a combination of employees and volunteers. The MDA also runs the national blood bank and prides itself on being as modern and responsive as possible.
There are six accredited medical schools in Israel and their students are found at the larger teaching hospitals like Hadassah Ein Kerem in Jerusalem or Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. Those schools are filled with a cross section of Israeli society: Jews, Arabs, Christians, Druze, secular, religious and skins of all colors.
Israel also has many of the features familiar to all hospitals: difficult parking, ambulances delivering patients to emergency wards, pervasive antiseptic smell in the halls along with omnipresent fluorescent white light. There are also interesting local angles to a hospital visit like hot tea often available 24/7 in wards for visitors, and volunteers who provide hot meals for families when a relative is hospitalized over the Jewish Sabbath.
“I think that overall the Israeli health system is working well,” said Barbara Swirski, a sociologist and founder of the Adva Center in Tel Aviv that has been studying health issues in Israel for the past three decades. “Of course, there is always room for improvement and there is never too much you can spend on health.”
The Equalizer
Adva’s work focuses on advancing equality and social justice in Israel. It monitors Israel’s health sector and works to close the holes in the system. Swirski acknowledged that every country seems to be struggling with common issues of health care budgets and number of hospital beds. She said that overall, all Israelis have a system that works and treats patients, including minorities, fairly and equally.
As part of a study of health systems in different countries under the auspices of the World Health Organization, investigators noted that health in Israel is similar to that of other developed countries, even though Israel spends less of its GDP (7.3%) on health care compared to other members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) like Canada (10.5%) or America (16.8%). The study said despite not changing the share of GDP allocated to health “Israel’s health status has improved significantly in recent decades,” noting as well that despite gains for all population subgroups, some disparities persist.
“There is often a problem maneuvering through the health bureaucracy that gives an unfair advantage to those who know the system or have the means to figure out the red tape,” Swirski said, but admitted that this was a common problem.
While the national health law mandates universal coverage for all citizens, Swirski lamented that migrants and those with questions over their residency status were having problems similar to European countries dealing with the same issue. She said the competitiveness of the Israeli health funds was good, although recent moves to sell additional health insurance was causing some people to unnecessarily double up on their coverage.
No matter where you are in the world nobody wants to get sick, and certainly never sick enough that you have to be hospitalized. However, when giving birth to start life or being cared for to fix it and keep it going, Israel has developed and maintained a relatively healthy health system.
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Featured image: Soroka Hospital via YouTube/Space Cat – Storytelling Creative House; Rambam Hospital via YouTube/Rambam HCC: heartbeat CC0 Max Pixel;
