One scanner for 500,000 people: “They tell you – either you pay to go private, or you die”
It’s a nerve-wracking experience that every Israeli knows all too well: they, or someone in their family, needs a complicated medical test – and that’s when the battle to get a timely appointment begins. It can take weeks or even months. The cancerous growth, meanwhile, doesn’t wait, and anyone who can fork up thousands of shekels turns to fixers and acquaintances in high places. Why is this the case? What prevents hospitals from acquiring more machines? And why is the ratio of machines to patients even worse in the peripheries? In Haifa, until this year, just one machine served half a million residents. In this Shomrim investigation, we took a standard PET-CT scan as a test case. Here are the findings.
November 24, 2021
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