Medical Association chides Treasury for 'misleading public' by listing highly paid MDs

Medical Association chid

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
The Israel Medical Association objected on Tuesday to the Finance Ministry report issued Monday that showed a dozen physicians among the highest paid in the Civil Service. IMA chairman Dr. Leonid Eidelman charged that the Treasury was "throwing sand in the eyes of the public" and accused it of "a dangerous attempt to mislead" by listing the doctors along with other civil servants. The highest-paid state physician is Prof. Yehuda Hiss, a veteran pathologist and head of the L. Greenberg Institute for Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, who has a gross salary of NIS 66,000 a month and more in benefits. Other well-paid physicians are the head of the Beersheba Mental Health Center, the head of intensive care at Poriya Medical Center in Tiberias and the head of the Lev Hasharon Medical Center (about NIS 62,000), followed by the directors of Barzilai Medical Center, the Be'er Ya'acov Mental Health Center, Wolfson Medical Center and Assaf Harofeh Medical Center and the Health Ministry's director-general (NIS 59,000 to NIS 55,000). Eidelman said that all the top-earning physicians were directors-general and managers of large medical institutions who "work day and night, managing hundreds or thousands of staffers and bearing the burden of heavy responsibility for human lives." The IMA head said that the vast majority of state physicians earn NIS 11,000 gross without overtime. "It is shameful that doctors who work around the clock and with lives at stake earn salaries that do not compensate them for their investment [of effort and time] and long period of training." Instead of publishing lists that give the impression all doctors earn high salaries, the state should think of solutions for the severe shortage of doctors and the urgent need to give suitable compensation to its physicians, Eidelman concluded.