Health maintenance organizations will start paying for Magen David Adom (MDA) ambulance service to transport sick patients to the hospital starting next February, according to a new procedure initiated by a consortium of health officials.
The joint initiative was developed by the Health Ministry, MK Uri Maklev (United Torah Judaism), chairman of the Public Petitions Committee, the health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and consumer health organizations, including the Magen David Adom emergency medical service.
The new amendment, which goes into effect in February 2010, mandates the HMOs to fund the expense of transporting insured patients to hospitals. The HMO that insures the patient will then pay the fee directly to MDA in accordance with his eligibility, rather than have the ambulance service collect it from the policy holder, as is the current practice.
If the patient is admitted to the hospital, the HMO will cover the full amount of the cost of the transportation; if not, the cost will be split between the HMO and the policy holder.
Fighting red tape
At present, the law states that Israelis must pay MDA privately for the service, then submit the receipt for payment of the bill to their inidividual HMO for full or partial reimbursement. Often, the patient does not understand what is going on when he is handed the small piece of paper by the medic, and neither does the family member or friend who accompanies him in the ambulance.
The process creates numerous difficulties, especially for those who have been hard-hit by the economic crunch. It is even worse for the elderly and new immigrants who are unemployed, illiterate in Hebrew or unaware of the regulations, and who get caught in a vast web of red tape in which interest piles up on the unpaid bill, followed by bill collectors' fees, and finally subpoenas to court proceedings for the unpaid bill they have long forgotten - all of which multiplies exponentially.
"We are fighting such a situation six years later," said one not-so-new immigrant in the northern Negev city of Arad who spoke with Israel National News on Wednesday afternoon, on condition of anonymity. "Our daughter fainted at school, and was sent by the clinic to the hospital. They kept her overnight. We had only been here a few months and knew no Hebrew at all, and the ambulance drivers knew no English, and handed us a paper, but didn't say what to do with it. We thought it was a copy, and they would file the original with the insurance, as they do in the U.S."
What happened instead was that the family got a bill a year later, for double the amount, again in Hebrew. They thought it was a mistake, and since they had changed HMOs, the original clinic would not respond to their calls to deal with the issue. "Our Hebrew was still not fluent, and since MDA insisted we pay a bill that was literally twice as high as the previous one, and neither of us had yet found a job, we both just gave up and put it aside," said the Arad resident.
That was a mistake. The bill has since multiplied exponentially and the account has gone to an attorney's office that specializes in bill collection, and which is now threatening to take them to court and seal the family's bank account. Meanwhile, their salaries are barely enough to make ends meet -- certainly not enough to pay the whopping fees now many times the original amount, and which could have been avoided if the new procedure had been in place.