Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 29 – The pandemic
has revealed serious shortcomings in Russia’s healthcare system, many of them
the product of the reduction in funding that has accompanied Vladimir Putin’s “optimization”
campaign, officials at the Audit Chamber say, noting that they are developing a
program that would reverse current trends (krizis-kopilka.ru/archives/75812).
Galina Izotova, deputy head of the
Chamber, says that polls show 41 percent of patients don’t trusts their
doctors, a reflection of declines in training, something that has been hard to
correct because in the last three years,
the numbers of all workers have fallen by 42 percent to only 268,000 for the
Russian Federation as a whole.
This is going to require the allocation
of more funds to the sector. Industrialized countries typically spend about 10
percent of their GDP on healthcare; but even if the increases the government is
currently proposing, Moscow will spend only about seven percent of GDP by 2024.
Far more money is needed.
And a poll by the Public Opinion
Foundation suggests there is growing support for reversing Putin’s approach to
the regions and for continuing the grant of authority to them the Kremlin
leader has made during the pandemic. Some 71 percent of people across the
country favor that step (vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2020/04/29/829338-epidemiya-regionalizma).
But one Ukrainian commentator,
Sergey Ilchenko, says any decentralization will leave Putin face to face with “a
multitude of petty Stalins who will struggle for access to resources.” Since
Moscow already has no resources to give them, “besides orders,” this will lead
to serious problems (dsnews.ua/world/virusnaya-korona-rossiyskoy-imperii-prevratit-li-pandemiya-28042020220000).
Meanwhile, Amnesty International has
released a report which concludes that Russia like many other countries has
devoted more attention to fighting dissent than to combatting the pandemic, a
position the Grani portal fully concurs in (eurasia.amnesty.org/2020/04/28/doklad-strany-vostochnoj-evropy-i-czentralnoj-azii/ and graniru.org/Society/Media/Freepress/m.278548.html).
And in yet another demonstration
that any crisis can be used to shift responsibility, Sergey Apoprienko, the
head of the Russian Forestry Agency, says the pandemic helps to explain why
Russia now faces so many problems with forest fires. Self-isolation is keeping
them from taking the steps needed, he suggests (babr24.com/msk/?IDE=200057).
