While the collapse of the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem continues to resonate in newspaper headlines and newscasts alike, there have been reports in the last few days of port workers in Ashdod and Haifa registering en masse for the Likud Party. According to these reports, the goal is to apply pressure on the Likud minister of transportation, Yisrael Katz, to put a halt to a plan to establish private ports in Israel.

Ostensibly, there is no connection between the financial crisis facing the hospital and the forceful struggle of the port workers. The truth is, however, that both cases are symptomatic of the same disease now plaguing the Israeli economy: Public organizations or semi-public organizations — as in the case of Hadassah, the electric company, health insurance providers and the Israel Broadcasting Authority — are run inefficiently by powerful interest groups that are not subject to any real oversight. Enormous systems that rely on public moneys are terrorizing the political system.

The Hadassah Medical Center collapsed because of poor management, with new information about the extent of it revealed every day. The state lacked the desire and the ability to oversee such a private entity, but now that the hospital has run out of cash and is in the process of freezing its debts, the government is being called in to extract it from the mire. The problem was more than just the hefty bonuses received by the general manager, professor Shlomo Mor Yosef, or the huge salaries of some of its doctors. The problem was the organizational culture in its entirety, which was wasteful and inefficient, lacked transparency and went unsupervised.

At the Ashdod and Haifa ports, powerful workers’ unions are controlled by domineering personalities like the chairman of the Ashdod Port Workers’ Committee, Alon Hassan. They have physically blocked any reforms geared toward making the economy more efficient and have terrified politicians. In the most recent incident, Hassan set out to sabotage the political career of former Labor Party chair Shelly Yachimovich, who dared to come out against him and assert that he is detrimental to organized labor.