From the Liveblog of
Thursday, July 20, 2023
Knesset Health Committee chief rebukes doctors union over anti-overhaul strike
Renee Ghert-Zand is the health reporter and a feature writer for The Times of Israel.
Amid discussions at the Knesset’s Health Committee, committee chair Uriel Busso lashes into the Israel Medical Association for opposing the coalition’s “reasonableness” bill, which is scheduled for second and third votes in the Knesset next week.
Physicians and other medical staff have participated in pro-democracy demonstrations for the last six months. More recently, the IMA, with the support of many of its member and partner organizations, has officially expressed its stance against the coalition’s actions.
Yesterday, doctors rallied nationwide and held a two-hour hospital “warning strike,” threatening a full or longer-term healthcare system strike if the government does not change course. The medical community warns that the impending legislation will harm the delivery of healthcare and the rights of patients.
“As someone who has volunteered many years in rescue organizations, and as an elected official and head of the Health Committee, I am shocked by the reality in which doctors and physicians’ organizations, who are supposed to be advancing doctors and medicine in Israel, are doing things completely opposed to the values that undergird medicine and humane morality: the saving of life, compassion, mercy and mutual help,” Busso says.
Busso adds that he has informed the IMA that it will not be given the “special status that it wants and is used to.”
“If it is going to turn itself into a political organization, then we will treat it like any political organization, and not as a professional medical one,” he says.
Health Minister Moshe Arbel has also criticized the strike, saying at a Health Ministry conference yesterday that “the public healthcare system must not become involved in the political divisiveness.
“The protests should be held outside or in the streets, but not inside the hospitals and not at the expense of patients’ health,” Arbel said, adding that it is nevertheless “important and appropriate to enable criticism of the government.”
