Pharmacy
PharmacyMoshe Shai/FLASH90

The Knesset's Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday approved for vote a law which would allow all Israelis, regardless of which health fund they use, to purchase prescription medications at all pharmacies, Calcalist reported.

The bill is backed by Yisrael Beytenu MKs Oded Forer, Yulia Malinovsky, and Robert Ilatov, as well as by Joint Arab List MK Ahmed Tibi.

Currently, Israelis can only purchase prescription medications at a pharmacy run by their health fund or a pharmacy which works with their health fund.

In recent years, patients' abilities to choose where to purchase medications has been severely limited by the use of digital prescriptions, visible only to health fund pharmacies and to the larger pharmacy chains.

A secondary result of the switch to digital prescriptions was that smaller, private pharmacies lost business.

According to Calcalist, the new law would allow patients issued a digital prescription to request a print version, allowing them to choose where to purchase their medications.