Private or Public Health Care?

In November 1947, all the department heads at Beilinson Hospital, except one, abandoned their posts. They informed Kupat Holim that the mass walkout was in response to the sick fund's refusal to allow them to engage in private practice. All efforts to coax the doctors to return to work failed, and the hospital found itself corralled within a hopelessly paralyzed system.

The walkout occurred six months prior to declaration of statehood. While the department heads' walkout at Beilinson Hospital was designed to attain better wages and improved working conditions, the revolt in fact generated a broader debate within Kupat Holim and the Federation of Labor about the face of public medicine in the Jewish state-in-the making and the principles upon which it should stand. In retrospect, the crisis at Beilinson hospital led to a revolution in the deployment of hospitalization services in Eretz Israel: the labor dispute (and the war) led to the establishment of a network of military hospitals that by 1953 were turned over to civilian authorities, thus creating a network of government-run hospitalization facilities managed directly by the Ministry of Health. The Beilinson crisis also led to a schism within the professional organization of physicians in Israel and the founding of a separate representative framework at government hospitals, parallel to the representative framework of Kupat Holim doctors. Ultimately this separate union, comprised solely of salaried physicians employed at government hospitals, kindled competition over wages and working conditions between the new union and the union representing Kupat Holim doctors that operated under the aegis of the Federation of Labor's industrial union division.