Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 3 – More Russians
are dying from cancer, heart disease and tuberculosis, among other causes, but
the Russian health ministry insists that this is the result of the aging of the
population, an argument Vladimir Putin has made, rather than on shortcomings in
the country’s medical system and the cutbacks in it the Kremlin leader has
made.
As a result, Natalya Chernova writes
in “Novaya gazeta,” the ministry will no longer use deaths as a measure of the
effectiveness of Russian medicine, a move that almost certainly will hide more
completely the increasingly disastrous state of Russian medicine and Russian
health under Putin (novayagazeta.ru/society/74399.html).
This change in official policy means
that Russians are going to be told from here on out that they and not the
health care system is responsible for any rise in deaths, although they can
expect that Moscow will trumpet any change in the opposite direction for any
reason as a triumph of its policies.
What apparently triggered this
policy change, the paper’s observer says, was the release of Rosstat statistics
showing mortality from major illnesses had increased last year, when under
Putin’s health “optimization” program the number of hospitals and doctors was
sharply reduced and because of the sanctions regime many medicines became unavailable.
Oleg Salagay, a representative of
the health ministry insists that “mortality to a large degree is defined by
demographic processes” rather than by the state of a country’s medical delivery
system. Given that Russia’s population is
aging, he says, “old people as is well known die more frequently.”
But other Russian government
statistics undercut that argument at least in part, Chernova says. In 2014,
Rosstat reported that Russians visited clinics eight million times fewer than
the number that had done so the year before. In many cases, nearby clinics had
been closed and they could not get to those farther away.
Moreover, Russian medical services
are costing more. Again, according to Russian government statistics, prices for
medical services rose by 24 percent alone in 2015, even though the incomes of
the population and hence the ability of Russians to pay for these services both
declined.
Experts at the Committee on Civic
Initiatives say that the main cause of rising mortality in Russia is to be
found in “the systemic mistakes of the leaders of the branch” as they have cut
back on medical services for the population.
At present and officially, 17,500 population centers in Russia now do
not have any medical services whatsoever. In fact, the situation is even worse.
People can’t afford to travel 20 to
40 kilometers every time they need medical health. In today’s difficult economy,
that is “an impermissible luxury,” Chernova says. Where people have to or go without, they die,
as in Kostromo oblast where the death rate went up 9.8 percent last year and in
Karelia where it rose 8.7 percent.
Not only are clinics being closed
but doctors and nurses are being fired, with the number of medical workers
declining by 90,000 in 2014 alone, and the number of hospital beds falling by
33,000 in that year, the last for which comprehensive statistics are
available. Russians are dying, and they
are doing so because of the policy of their own government.
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