Aliyah Diary 27: Israel Healthcare Experience

View All Aliyah Blog Entries

Aliyah Diary

Arrival
01. Aug 19, 2024: Preparation In America
02. Aug 25, 2024: First Few Days
03. Aug 29, 2024: Moving In

Cultural Adjustment
04. Sept 4, 2024: First Day of School
05. Sept 8, 2024: Two Weeks In . . .
06. Sept 16, 2024: Getting Comfortable
07. Sept 22, 2024: Ready for Yom Tov
09. Sept 30, 2024: Nasrallahed on the Floor
15. Nov 10, 2024: Safety Fourth
18. Nov 24, 2024: Language – l’at, ‘lat
29. Jan 31, 2025: My Son Still in America
31. Feb 3, 2025: Internet Filtering for Kids
34. Feb 17, 2025: Finding Obscure Things

The Roads
24. Jan 5, 2025: Supermarkets & Highways
25. Jan 12, 2025: Not Cutting Me Off
36. Feb 25, 2025: Road Rules of Israel

Government and Bureaucracy
10. Oct 8, 2024: Driver’s License
11. Oct 13, 2024: Packages. (חבילות.)
13. Oct 30, 2024: Bureaucracies and Stories
19. Nov 28, 2024: Taxation for Americans
22. Dec 23, 2024: Doctors & “Choleh Chadash”
27. Jan 23, 2025: Healthcare in Israel
32. Feb 5, 2025: How To Hire the Wrong Person
33. Feb 10, 2025: Quest to Pay My Taxes

Politics & Thought
12. Oct 25, 2024: October Sun and the Jew
16. Nov 17, 2024: Where People Look Like Me
17. Nov 19, 2024: Jewish Identity and Outlook
21. Dec 11, 2024: Let Freedom Ring

Travel and Trips
08. Sept 25, 2024: Jerusalem Concert
14. Nov 2, 2024: The Kindness of Strangers
20. Dec 5, 2024: Tel Aviv Art Museum
23. Dec 29, 2024: The West Bank. (Shomron)
26. Jan 18, 2025: Dead Sea Beer and Ice Cream
28. Jan 26, 2025: Yarkon River Judaism, Tel Aviv
30. Jan 31, 2025: My Son Visits and we Travel
35. Feb 20, 2025: Mitzpe Ramon Stars, Ein Avdat

Type your email…

Subscribe

Introduction

I consider myself a moderate Republican – Susan Collins being my favorite Senator. If there’s ever anything that could move the needle towards socialism, here it is. Israel has four health care companies that compete, yet are government funded. It works. This is worth making aliyah for.

Healthcare in Israel

Experience in Israel: You pay taxes and everyone gets basic healthcare. I can’t quite figure out what those taxes are, though it can’t be as bad as America. I think it’s up to 12% of income … you’d have to make more than about $400k/yr a to pay what I was paying for healthcare for my family in the United States, and here you actually get the service you’re paying for in about1/10th the time – no paperwork to fill out, no phone calls to overburdened receptionists, and if you have a question for your doctor … you can send one.

My doctor in the United States was consistently 45 minutes late to the appointment while I sat in a room with one of those uncomfortable bed things with the paper draped over it.

There is some rationing of healthcare in Israel, so I’ve heard from Rav Zilberstein seforim (which are excellent) on medicine.

If you want to pay more per months (more than just your taxes), there are other perks such as a specialist for $15 or something like that … see the specialist as much as you want over three months. Each company has its perks to attract members: mine allows me to go to a gym of my choice for very little money, a few times a month. (I go much more than that so it’s not worth it to me.)

Visiting the Doctor

I’ve been a few times now for myself and kids … make an appointment on the healthcare company’s website. Select the doctor or search for one by location, specialty, language spoken … select a time. Done.

Show up and swipe your healthcare card. The machine spits out a receipt telling you your number and which room to go to. You also get a text message. Walk over to the door, have a seat outside, and at your appointment – or earlier – you’re in and out in about 10 minutes (assumedly longer if needed).

During this entire experience – each time – I interacted with exactly one person: the doctor. My credit card stayed in your wallet. Bills do not come in the mail. There is no need to call doctor’s offices to get copies of your records – they are immediately available to the doctor when your card is swiped.

Need a prescription? Go to the pharmacy and swipe your card again. That’s it.

Finding a Specialist

This has been a bit more difficult – there are private doctors here who make more than those that are part of the regular healthcare system and they get paid more – sometimes as much as a doctor in the United States, sometimes less. The price, however, seems to be a flat fee. There aren’t a lot of hidden fees and upcharges like there are in the U.S. … need X-rays at the dentist? Included. Want your beard trimmed at the barber? Included. (Have to pay privately for a barber … as far as I know.)

However, where it is similar to the United States is that to get an appointment with a specialist that takes your health insurance takes about three months.

Communication with the Doctor Between Visits

You can write your doctor after an appointment with quick questions and prescription refills on the healthcare website!

This system was clearly developed by doctors who don’t like being needlessly bothered on weekends or have to read pages and pages of tales of woe.. Someone clearly thought this through as messages are very limited in length and you can only send a few a month to your doctor. You can get your message across … immediately … and it is efficient for the doctor. Even better, have you ever heard this from a doctor – “Why did you wait for the weekend to ask me for a refill?” In Israel, when you send the message you select, “send to doctor only on weekday or also Shabbat and holidays?” Different levels of urgency are built into the system and on the weekend, doctors need only see the urgent messages.

I got refills this way . . . probably took the doctor and myself a total of under a minute for the interaction. It’s kind of like using Google Classroom to post a homework assignment with a question and getting an instant grade, rather than having to collect homework in class, grade it, and hand it back. Google Classroom is the best thing to happen to education in … a while.

Your kids

Select them in the website – now you’re doing the exact same thing … just for a child. They show up for both parents and when either one makes an appointment, both parents get a text message.

That’s it. Short article. Look how Israel keeps health care costs down.

The rest* are screenshots.

Screenshots

---

---

---

---

Healthcare Experience in the United States*

I wrote this section first and then realized … the article should be focused on healthcare in Israel. Everyone already knows how bad healthcare is in America. It’s just my own rant. Leaving it here in small print for those who aren’t yet familiar.

Family with kids: $22,000/yr for the BRONZE plan – the lowest plan that covers only basics with deductible of about $11,000. Most things, somehow, don’t end up going towards the deductible. Never met the deductible even with health care costs going above that.

With just regular doctors … add $500/yr, minimum, per family member. That assumes no one gets sick. Sprain your wrist? Kid falls off a bike? Dentist – Cavity? Tooth x-ray? Add a few hundred dollars … out of hospital. Hospital visit? Wait hours in a waiting room, then at least an hour, sometimes a lot more, in a hallway and have a doctor see you for five minutes. A few months later you get a pseudo-randomly priced bill between $800 and $3000 or so. Then you call the hospital and negotiate the price. Waste of everyone’s time and just makes healthcare cost more.

Need a root canal? Expect another $3500 … with insurance premiums! Sick visit? Urgent care? Add $400, easily. None of these prices will be known until you receive the bill, well after your care. The facility won’t tell you because they can say “you have to ask your insurance company” only there’s no one to ask.

Before Covid I was part of a group health insurance plan that went bankrupt. They sent nasty letter after letter demanding I pay them more money for a service they weren’t providing. “Didn’t you read the fine print in a 500 page book about your benefits that says we can do this?”

What if you need a specialist? Go find one. There aren’t enough. I knew someone who knew someone … he fit one of my kids in between a school play and his first patient of the day. Try to call his office or others like it on your own and if you’re really, really lucky … someone will answer the phone after being on hold for 10 to 20 minutes and give you an appointment in their other office 45 minutes away … in three months. Get there, after months of waiting for an appointment … “Where are your medical records?” Don’t you have them? The other doctor said they sent them to you. $350 down the drain … unless they can get it from the other doctor … who might be owned by the same group … while the clock ticks. I have a phone number that used to belong to a doctor’s office. Years later former patients are still calls looking for medical records.

Contributions to HIgh Healthcare in the United States

There are fewer and fewer independent doctors. To staff in a small doctor’s office in the United States they need one or two women who fight with insurance companies all day. Another to book appointments and call to remind people to show up. Nurse practitioners, et al, to act like doctors and take various vitals before you see the doctor. Someone has to interact with pharmacies who, in turn, need staff to interact with doctor’s offices. Insurance companies delay payments, pay too little, deny coverage, mail checks to the patients who may or may not forward them to the doctor … bills have to be sent to patients, explained, gone after with collection agencies, and the invoices are incomprehensible with insurance adjustments months after the service was provided along with codes and a streams of individual envelopes about your service and what wasn’t covered.

I made aliyah five months ago and I’m still getting bills from America for a single medical procedure that cost more than I’ve paid for the entire family, in total, for healthcare in Israel in the last five months. Even better, Obama raised income taxes by about 2 or 3% (though they don’t call it income tax – yet, it is).

Another provision: insurance companies have to pay out 80% of what they bill. So if you’re a private company that has to appease shareholders, how do you make more money? Raise your rates. 20% of a larger number is … a larger number.

It’s a mess and doctors hate it too so there is a growing shortage compounding the problem. Bottom line: I avoided the doctor and especially hospitals whenever possible and was paying somewhere around $45,000 a year, easily, for family medical care in the United States.