Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 11 – As a result of
the pandemic, Russians in many ways are feeling the results of Vladimir Putin’s
health care “optimization” program which was intended to reduce the number of
hospitals, medical points, and medical professionals and raise the pay and
equipment of those remaining.
Between 2013 and 2019, according to
Rosstat, Andrey Nechayev, an economic development minister in Yeltsin’s time,
Moscow cut the number of junior medical personnel by almost a third, the number
of mid-level professionals by 9.3 percent, and the number of doctors overall by
two percent to 704,000 (blog.newsru.com/article/11apr2020/rasplata).
But if the total reduction in the
number of doctors was not too large, that of specialists was far greater. Now,
compared with 2011, there are 10 percent fewer medical doctors who specialize
in infectious diseases – leaving only “about 7,000” for the Russian Federation
as a whole. However adequate that may be in normal times, it is far too few
during this pandemic.
And unlike many problems where the
link between the difficulties ordinary Russians face and Putin’s policies, here
the link is direct and obvious. The Kremlin has tried to cover itself by
offering special subsidies to those who shift to work in this sphere, but
serious specialists in the area of infectious disease can’t be trained
overnight.
But the problems that optimization
have created and that are now all too much in evidence are even worse because
they come on top of the collapse of hospital beds for infectious diseases. In
1990, the RSFSR had 140,000 such dedicated beds. Last year, Nechayev says,
their number had fallen to 59,000. And the situation with medicines is equally
dire.
Nonetheless, the Putin regime’s
advocates keep talking about the triumphs of Russian health care in the era of
the pandemic. But anyone who looks at the
numbers and especially at the cutbacks the Kremlin leader has been responsible
for would be unlikely to describe what is happening as a success.
No comments:
Post a Comment