The roots of the affair of the payment of the salaries of the Ministry of Health personnel by entities supervised by the Ministry are deeply rooted in the anomaly known as “health corporations”. The public knows the hospitals well, but the health corporations, which operate in the very same place, are more hidden – and for good reason. This is, in the end, another Israeli invention which is a distortion created to solve another distortion and that is the ongoing under-budgeting of the hospitals. The health corporations are the ones who are responsible for the operation of the hospitals in the afternoons, collect donations, allow shortening of queues for surgeries and hospitalizations, recruit doctors and quality personnel, purchase complex equipment and new devices, conduct research and more. So if they’re so good, what’s the problem? In contrast to the hospital – the corporation is almost never supervised by the Ministry of Finance (budget department and the commissioner of wages), and therefore it was nicknamed the “backyard” of the hospital system. This is also the reason why the Treasury is waging an age-old battle against the Ministry of Health and the hospitals to increase their supervision.
And there are quite a few good reasons for that. The first – the corporations have grown to monstrous proportions: today they make up about a third of the hospital’s operations. In a hospital like Sheba, the corporation employs almost half of the employees. According to data from the Ministry of Finance, the corporations already generate about NIS 3 billion a year and employ more than 10,000 workers in the hospital system. The second reason is that the corporations began to expand into other areas and in some cases became a kind of business entities, which have other, sometimes problematic, interests. An example of this was revealed in “Calcalist” in January 2022, regarding the connection between the Sheba corporation and the private company Target to establish a system of tests during the Corona virus, which raked in hundreds of millions of shekels without supervision.
In the latest draft of the Arrangements Law, the Budget Division demanded an increase in the payment that the corporations, which are private non-profits, transfer to hospitals, which are owned by the state, for the use of hospital infrastructure in the afternoon hours. In the Arrangements Law for 2021, for example, an attempt was made to increase the supervision of wages in corporations In all cases, the Ministry of Finance failed in its attempts to create a successful supervision of the corporations, when the one who always stood by them was the Ministry of Health, including the CEOs of the Ministry for generations. The Ministry of Health claims, and rightly so, that without the corporations the Israeli hospital system will collapse and will not be able to provide proper health services to the citizens of Israel.
However, the current affair gives support to the Ministry of Finance’s claim that the corporate reins have been completely loosened. The treasury will find a smoking gun here, which will prove why those non-profits must be monitored. After all, these are employees of a supervisory body, who are on the payroll of the supervised body. This is similar to the situation where employees of the government companies were employed by Israel Railways or the Electric Company, or the supervisor of The health insurance funds in the Ministry of Health were employed through the Klalit Health Insurance Fund or Maccabi. The clear conclusion is that the supervision of corporations must be increased – and the Ministry of Health must change its approach in this regard. However, the baby must not be thrown out with the bathwater. That is, harming the corporations, without strengthening the The patients significantly. Otherwise, the citizens are the ones who will pay the price.