Putin’s Healthcare ‘Optimization’ Behind Rising Death Rates in Russia, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 5 – Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova’s comments about rising mortality rates in Russian regions and also about official efforts to cover this trend up (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/07/is-moscow-finally-going-to-focus-on.html) has not surprisingly led to a flood of articles on the subject, many of them very critical of the Kremlin.

            In an article entitled “The Fruits of Optimization: Mortality in Rusisa has Risen too the Level of National Disaster,” Irina Mishina of Novyye izvestiya presents the devastating observations of doctors, patients and health care experts about what is happening in Russia now and who is to blame (newizv.ru/news/society/03-07-2019/plody-optimizatsii-smertnost-v-rossii-podnyalas-do-urovnya-natsionalnogo-bedstviya).

            It is not just that local officials are concealing death figures, they say; the health ministry continues to blame higher death rates exclusively on the flu, the aging of the population, or overconsumption of alcohol, even though statistics show that these things do not account for the rise in the death rate Russians are now experiencing. 

            “According to Rosstat data for 2017, Mishina says, “one of the basic causes of mortality of men in Russia are not problems with alcohol but with the circulatory system. As a result of heart attacks 102,000 Russian men aged 16 to 59 died from that.” Cancer was the second cause, and the third was accidents, murders, suicides, and so on.

            But the most horrific thing government figures show is that Russians “are beginning to die at younger ages.”  According to the health ministry, Russia has seen an upsurge of death among men and women aged 35 to 44; and a major reason for that, Mishina says, is that the remaining hospitals focus on the diseases of the elderly than on those of working-age adults.

            The biggest problem, however, is the lack of access to medical care. People are dying because there is no longer any ambulance service, medical point or hospital. One piece of evidence of this is that today “the level of mortality in rural areas is 13 percent higher than in the cities.”

            The government’s health care optimization program is to blame for this.  The regime hides the figures, but according to the Alliance of Doctors, between 2002 and 2017, the number of hospitals was reduced by 5,000 and the number of polyclinics by 1,000. By all accounts, the rate of closures is increasing even as death rates are going up.

            These closures are leading to a situation, the Alliance says, where “today it is practically impossible to receive emergency medical assistance.” Added to the fact that many cases are not diagnosed early on because of the shortage of medical facilities, that necessarily increases the number of deaths. 

            Instead of spending the seven percent of GDP on health care that the World Health Organization recommends, Anastasiya Vasiliyev of the Alliance continues, Russia is currently spending only 3.6 percent. “Budget moneys are going for football, for Syria for God knows what but not for the development of accessible medical help.” 

And the situation appears likely to get worse not better. Specialists say that “if the authorities continue to close hospitals at the current rates, by 2021-2022, the number of medical institutions in the country will fall to 3,000, that is to the level of the Russian Empire in 1913” (rbc.ru/society/07/04/2017/58e4feb59a794722462a85aa).