Leumit Health Fund is an Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

i HMO, founded in 1933 by the Revisionist Zionist Movement.

History

Leumit Health Fund was established in 1933 in Dr. Yaakov Vinshal's kitchen in Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv , officially Tel Aviv-Yafo , is the second most populous city in Israel, with a population of 404,400 on a land area of . The city is located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline in west-central Israel. It is the largest and most populous city in the metropolitan area of Gush Dan, with...

 - Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

 by physicians who had been dismissed from their work in the General Health Fund (Clalit

Clalit

Clalit, also Klalit is one of Israel's leading health service organizations. Widely known as Kupat Holim Clalit, it was established in 1911 as a mutual aid society...

) at the time of the violent events following Arlosoroff's murder. Dr. Vinshal's clinic was the first clinic to belong to the Fund, which has advanced a long way since then.

In 1940 the poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg determined that the Fund's function is "to educate and to cure the bodies". Abba Ahimeir

Abba Ahimeir

Abba Ahimeir was a Jewish journalist, historian and political activist. One of the ideologues of Revisionist Zionism, he was the founder of the Revisionist Maximalist faction of the Zionist Revisionist Movement and of the clandestine Brit HaBirionim....

 added: "The Jews

Jews

The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

 must be taught to be healthy even when they are ill". Since then and to this day, Leumit Health Fund has been promoting health services and health education and providing the community with advanced medical services.

Back in the 1930s, its founders determined that the uniqueness of the Leumit Health Fund would be expressed by offering its members the right to select the fund, physician and medical services of their choice - a uniqueness that has remained to this very day.

The Fund's first manager, Mr. Melamedowitz, determined that the Fund would be open to everyone, and demanded that the employees and managers relate to the members of the Fund as acquaintances and not as numbers. The Fund indeed continues to pursue this path - a Fund whose doors are open to all residents of Israel, including new immigrants, city, kibbutz

Kibbutz

A kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism...

 and settlement dwellers, the religious and ultra-religious, minority groups and secular Israelis.

Today

Leumit is one of the four health funds in Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

and has about 700,000 members. Leumit operates more than 300 medical centers and 100 pharmacies nationwide.