Kupat Holim and the Health Insurance Question

In February 1950, the Kanevsky-Kanev Commission (the Kanev Commission)—established to investigate what shape social insurance in the State of Israel should take—completed its work and presented its first report to Minister of Labor Golda Meir (Myerson). Among the commission's recommendations was the suggestion that the health system be nationalized. Publication of the report was put off by the Ministry of Finance to prevent pressure on the government's budget, but the content was leaked to the press and sparked hot controversy. The Kanev Report was only made public three months later accompanied by a clarification that it did not reflect official policy, but the event marked the official inauguration of debate on the future of health services in the State of Israel, the place of Kupat Holim in the state, and, above all, whether to mandate a compulsory government health insurance law in the course of social legislation for the newly-established State of Israel.

Leaks to the press from the Kanev Commission's February 1950 report, and the stormy debate that it created, had already made it clear to Kupat Holim that it must put the issue on its own agenda and reformulate its position regarding the future. The sick fund had to decide how it viewed itself within the future health system after statehood and what its position was vis-à-vis the Kanev Commission's recommendation for compulsory health insurance law—the same kind of legislation that Kupat Holim itself had championed for almost two decades under the British Mandate, without success.