Israel yet to name members of new Health Basket committee

Although new medical technologies added to the 2024 health basket are supposed to be announced by the end of December and the names of the Basket Committee members are due to be named months earlier, the Health and Finance Ministries have failed to do so. 

The Jerusalem Post learned however, that Prof. Dina Ben Yehuda, head of the hematology department at the Hadassah-University Medical Center and dean of the Hebrew University-Hadassah Faculty of Medicine will chair the committee for the second time in a row. All the members are unpaid volunteers.

A month ago, the Doctors Online website reported that the names of the basket committee members have, unusually, not yet been announced. When The Jerusalem Post asked the Health Ministry on Thursday morning who the chairman and the other members will be and why there has been a delay, it ignored the question completely. The committee will apparently have NIS 550 million at its disposal to add to the basket of medications and technologies that the four health funds supply their members. 

However, the two ministries did go out of their way to announce on Thursday morning the name of one member approved by Health Minister Uriel Busso and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. She is Dr. Khetam Hussein, a Druze woman doctor to the Medicines Basket Committee, and that the committee would “start working during the coming week.” 

Busso said that Hossein is “an excellent and experienced professional who will greatly contribute to the Health Basket Committee. Her appointment is another sign of the lifelong alliance that exists between us and the Druze community. We are committed to making sure that the men and women of the community will integrate into key positions and decision-making centers in all areas of life in Israel.”

Smotrich commented that she has “great professionalism and sensitivity in her work. As a member of the Druze community, she strengthens the strong partnership between the people of Israel and the Druze community and is another sign of our shared life alliance.”

A debt to the Druze community

As the Druze medical specialist is the only committee member who has been named, it could be suggested that this resulted from the tragic deaths of six Druze officers and soldiers in the war against Hamas and widespread demands among Israelis that the Netanyahu government’s 2018 controversial “Nation-State Law” that states that “the right to exercise national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people, establishing Hebrew as Israel’s official language and downgrading Arabic to a “special status” be canceled due to Druze and others’ opposition.

Hussein specialized in internal medicine and infectious diseases at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa and served as a senior physician in the infectious disease unit, managing the infection-prevention unit and the COVID-19 department. She is now deputy director of the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya.

Married and the mother of two daughters, she was born in the village of Rama in the Galilee and currently lives in the city of Karmiel. She was chosen to light a torch at the 75th Independence Day ceremony for the State of Israel for being a pioneer in the medical field and a social pioneer. In addition to her work at the hospital, she also served as a senior lecturer in the faculty for medicine at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

Busso said that Hussein is “an excellent and experienced professional who will greatly contribute to the Medicines Basket Committee. Her appointment is another sign of the lifelong alliance that exists between us and the Druze community. We are committed to making sure that the men and women of the community will integrate into key positions and decision-making centers in all areas of life in Israel.”