CLALIT (כללית). Just say NO.

I think the title says it all really. After 5 months of being here we are still battling with the dreaded Clalit (כללית) re: our health cover. It’s not so much  the service thats the problem, the doctors and nurses are kind [if not overstretched but that’s normal] the surgery is reasonably clean and I think they are competent but the admin is a disaster. We don’t understand our entitlements and haven’t received a single bill since we got here. Of course they happily remove money from our account on a monthly basis.

Having been coerced into signing up with Clalit [one of Israels 4 healthcare providers] at an aliyah fair the day we arrived, based largely on the fact that they have a big presence in the North and they sold us the best shpiel, we are now in a position 5 months later where we are paying lots of money for goodness knows what. Their English marketing literature is severely limited and neither Husband nor I have the patience to decipher the entire full length version in Hebrew. The English website is also limited [partly by the Russian content]. So we are still in the dark.

In short, we have been paying extravagant amounts of money for a service we don’t really understand, and it’s very frustrating. As I was heavily pregnant when we signed up, I decided to play it safe and go for top whack healthcare. After all if I needed something it would not be a good time to start shopping around. When they [finally] sent me a brief explanation of that service, none of it actually looked essential to me. The extras included dental care for false teeth, orthodontic treatment, emergency operations abroad, pregnancy care and a load of other things I couldn’t imagine using. So we decided we would need to downgrade.

Of course getting to an actual human who can help us with this is nigh on impossible.

Every so often, somebody with a friendly, sugary voice from Clalit calls us up to “help”. This week was no different. A woman called me up to wish me mazal tov on the birth of Yaron [now 4 months old but she said they always call at this age]. She offered me a bunch of not terribly useful services which I can get subsidised, e.g baby massage [I know how to do that so I am unlikely to pay for the privelege of seeing someone else do it, even if it is subsidised]. I explained that I had no idea how to even take advantage of what she was offering me, let alone what else I could do. She was nice to me for a while then realised she was out of her depth and promised someone with better english would call and explain it to me.

Unbelievably somebody did. But he was pretty useless too. He kept repeating what services I could receive on platinum healthcare., and I kept telling him that services aboard were useless to me [I have no plans to leave the country in the immediate future, nor am I allowed to], I don’t currently need false teeth or braces as I am 31 not 91, I don’t need pregnancy care as I just had a baby and the reductions on basic dental care do not justify the extra payments [at least not yet] and could we PLEASE HAVE A REFUND on the extra money that they essentially STOLE from us under false pretences. He spent ages on the phone to me and Husband, eventually telling us his manager would call us in 10 minutes.

My arse.

They never call you. Even if you threaten to cancel and go with Maccabi or another provider. They just want our money and couldn’t care less if we are dissatisfied. So now we have to use the classic Israeli Method of Getting What One Wants, as my lovely plumber explained to me early on in my aliyah.

We have to write a letter. Or rather a fax. Israelis LOVE to fax. Coz even after 3,000 years of wandering, persecution and assimilation, Jews are still essentially the People of The Book, and apparently only the written word gets any credence. We live and hope, please Lord, speedily in our days. Selah.