Hadassah has reacted sharply to a report in the Los Angeles Times alleging that Arab patients are turned away from its hospitals in Israel.
Dr. Samuel Penchas, director general of the Hadassah Medical Organization, called the report “a seriously misleading analysis of a very complex situation.”
Carmela Efros Kalmanson, national president of Hadassah, charged that the Times story by Daniel Williams, published Monday, “paints a grossly distorted picture of the health care received in Israeli institutions by Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza.”
Penchas denied that Palestinians from those territories were being refused medical care because the Israeli government will no longer pay their hospital bills.
“No patient, whatever his or her ethnic origin or ability to pay, has ever been denied care at a Hadassah hospital under any circumstances,” he said.
Penchas also termed false the Times’ implication that a Palestinian youth was denied a bone marrow transplant at Hadassah because the government would not cover the cost of the procedure.
He said it may have been delayed “because there is a very long waiting list for bone marrow transplants” at Hadassah hospitals and other hospitals where they are performed.
According to Dr. Shimon Slavin, head of the bone marrow transplant department at the Hadassah Medical Center, one-third of its patients since its inception have been Arabs from the territories.
According to Penchas, leaders of the Palestinian uprising discourage West Bank Arabs from seeking medical care at Israeli facilities.
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