Bulletin: Public Health, Hospitals, and Professionals

Articles

• Stuart Altman, Should Israel Be Concerned by the High Proportion of Medical Care Paid for Privately
• Hadar Amir et al, Bedouin Women’s Gender Preferences When Choosing Obstetricians and Gynecologists
• Sue Anderson et al, The UK, Israel, and the USA:  The Impact of Healthcare Systems on Health
• Liat Ashkenazi et al, Male Nurses in Israel
• Sarah Ben-Ami and Aliza Yaffe, Palliative Care in Israel: The Nursing Perspective
• Merav Ben-Natan et al, Factors That Influence Israeli Muslim Arab Parents’ Intention to Vaccinate Their Children
• Shuli Brammli-Greenberg et al, Why and How Did Israel Adopt Activity-Based Hospital Payment
• Nissim Cohen, Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Bending the Rules in the Context of Informal Payments for Health Care
• Saralee Glasser et al, Intervention for Antenatal Depression by Public Health Nurses in an Ultra-Orthodox Community
• Anthony D. Heymann, Unsupportive Social Interactions are Associated with Poorer Self-reported Health in Israeli Patients with Diabetes
• Tamar Jacob, Implications of the National Health Insurance Law and for Physical Therapy Services
• Ilya Kagan et al, Public Health Nurses in Israel
• Ahmed Khalaila et al, Health Related Absenteeism of Family Physicians in the Negev
• Liat Lerner-Geva et al, Cultural Disparities in the Use of Medications Among Midlife Women in Israel
• Natali Levin, Medical Malpractice in Israel
• Joseph Mendlovic et al, Geographic Variation in Selected Hospital Procedures and Services
• Basil Porter et al, Community Paediatrics in Israel
• Carlos Quiñonez, Dental Reform in Israel’s National Health Insurance Law
• Mark Schweda et al, Views on End-of-Life Decision Making among Religious and Secular Persons in the USA, Germany, and Israel
• Yaffa Shir-Raz and Eli Avraham, PR Strategies of Pharmaceutical Companies in Countries Where Direct Advertising of Prescription Drugs Is Banned
• Diana Tasher et al, Child Health Care in Israel
• Chen Stein Zamir and Avi Israeli, Perceptions About Routine Childhood Vaccinations Among Jewish Ultra-Orthodox Mothers
• Cheryl Zlotnick et al, Comparing the Health Status of Youth Village Alumni in Israel to the General Population

New Article: Razon, Jews, Bedouins, and the Making of the Secular Israeli

Razon, Na’amah. “Entangled Bodies: Jews, Bedouins, and the Making of the Secular Israeli.” Medical Anthropology (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2016.1138950

 

Abstract

Taking Israel’s National Health Insurance Law as a point of entry, in this article I probe how notions of equality and citizenship, secularism and religion become entangled in the experience of Negev/Naqab Bedouin, who are Palestinian citizens of Israel. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I show how Jewish citizens have come to represent the secular and modern citizens in the region, while Bedouins, although mandated and claimed by policy and providers to be the ‘same’ and ‘equal’, are always already imagined and characterized as other. Universal healthcare and the daily manner in which biomedicine is practiced in southern Israel provides an avenue for examining the Jewish valences medicine carries in southern Israel, Israel’s boundaries of inclusion, and the connection between biomedicine and secularism.

 

 

 

New Article: Shmueli, Calculation of the Israeli Risk Adjustment Rates

Shmueli, Amir. “On the Calculation of the Israeli Risk Adjustment Rates.” European Journal of Health Economics 16.3 (2015): 271-277.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10198-014-0572-x

 

Abstract

Objective

The Israeli risk adjustment formula, introduced in 1995 and which serves for the allocation of the health budget to the sickness funds, is unique compared to countries with a similar national health insurance system in that it is not calculated on the basis of actual cost data of the sickness funds but on the basis of quantities retrieved from surveys. The current article aims to analyze the implications of the Israeli methodology.

Methods

The article examines the validity of the Israeli methodology used to set the 2004 risk adjustment rates and compare these rates with the “correct” ones, which are derived from the 2004 internal relative cost scales of the sickness funds.

Results

The Israeli methodology ignores services provided by the sickness funds and assumes constant unit cost across the sickness funds, an assumption which is implausible. Comparing the actual and the “correct” rates, it turns out that the actual rates over-compensate all the sickness funds for members in age 0–14, and under-compensate them for insurees aged 55+. In age 0–4, the over-compensation per capita is about NIS 1,500 while the under-compensation in age group 75+ reaches NIS 1,600.

Conclusions

The current risk adjustment formula distorts the intended competition on good quality care among the sickness funds, and turns it into a competition on profitable members. After 18 years of using incorrect rates, the Israeli risk adjustment rates should be calculated, as is common in other systems, based on individual cost data from the sickness funds.

 

Report: A Picture of the Nation, 2015; Taub Center for Social Policy

The Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel Presents:

A Picture of the Nation: Israel’s Society and Economy in Figures, one of the Center’s most popular publications, provides concise and thought-provoking information on Israel’s long-run economic and social trajectories.  Each page of this booklet contains a single graph and short, accompanying text that, when combined, provide the reader with a broad and comprehensive understanding of key socioeconomic issues in Israel today.  Policy makers, the media, the general public, and the global Jewish community look to the Picture of the Nation as an invaluable and highly accessible resource on topics ranging from the labor market to education, poverty and much more.

For the English page, including PDF and PPT versions of the report, as well as previous reports (2002-2014), click here.

For the Hebrew page, click here.

PDF version in English: Picture of the Nation, 2015.

PDF version in Hebrew: תמונת מצב המדינה, 2015.

Dissertation: Razon, Citizenship, Science, and Medicine in the Negev/Naqab

Razon, Na’amah. Producing Equality: Citizenship, Science, and Medicine in the Negev/Naqab. University of California, San Francisco, 2013.

 

URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1461769531

 

Abstract

In 1994 Israel passed the National Health Insurance Law (NHIL), guaranteeing universal and equal healthcare services to all citizens. Universal healthcare, while unprecedented in Israel, did not have a significant impact on the country’s Jewish majority. Yet for minority citizens such as the Bedouin community in the southern Israel, the NHIL transformed access to medical services, increasing insurance coverage from 60% to 100%, and changing the patient demographic in the regional hospital. Nonetheless, since 1995 when the law was implemented, disparities in health outcomes between Jewish and Arab citizens in the country have widened. Healthcare reform took place within a geo-political landscape that continues to marginalize its Arab citizens. Thus the paradigm of equality of healthcare intersects with national policies that create a differential citizenship in Israel. This dissertation, Producing Equality: Citizenship, Science, and Medicine in the Negev/Naqab , examines the impact of Israel’s National Health Insurance Law as a site to understand how Israel’s policies of inclusion and exclusion of Bedouin Arab citizens become entangled. My work highlights the tensions that exist between expansive and technical medical care that the state allocates to its Bedouin citizens, and the limited financial and political support the Bedouin community receives from the government in other spheres. Healthcare in southern Israel provides an important site to study the active production of the boundaries of citizenship, medicine, and reconfiguring of discrimination. I argue that the emphasis on scientific discourse in the medical arena ignores the social and political problems that place much of the Bedouin community in poor health. Therefore social, political, and historical questions that are central to understanding health disparities in the region remain beyond the scope of what providers view as relevant to their work. This bounding of medical care allows for the continuation of discriminatory policies towards the Bedouin citizens, while permitting the state and healthcare providers to assert they provide equal care to all patients.

Subject: Medical Ethics; Middle Eastern Studies; Public health

Classification: 0497: Medical Ethics; 0555: Middle Eastern Studies; 0573: Public health

Identifier / keyword: Social sciences, Health and environmental sciences, Bedouins, Citizenship, Equality, Israel, National Health Insurance Law, Access to services

Number of pages: 279

Publication year: 2013

Degree date: 2013

School code: 0034

Source: DAI-B 75/02(E), Aug 2014

Place of publication: Ann Arbor

Country of publication: United States

ISBN: 9781303486456

Advisor: Kaufman, Sharon

Committee member: Whitmarsh, Ian, Briggs, Charles

University/institution: University of California, San Francisco

Department: Medical Anthropology

University location: United States — California

Degree: Ph.D.

Source type: Dissertations & Theses

Language: English

Document type: Dissertation/Thesis

Dissertation/thesis number: 3599403

ProQuest document ID: 1461769531