Window on Eurasia

Moscow Ignoring Impact of Benefits Monetarization in Regions

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 28, 2006 – In the months since the large public demonstrations against the monetarization of benefits died down, the Russian government and the Moscow media have largely ignored the ways in which this change has continued to hit ordinary Russians in the regions very hard.

But a new survey of reports in five different regions of the country
suggests that many Russians are suffering not only because they cannot
afford to pay for many of the medicines they used to get for free but
because government officials in both Moscow and regional capitals are
unable to cope with the new situation.

And the analysis, carried by the “Russkiy zhurnal” Internet portal
this week, suggests the impact of these reforms varies so much from one
region to another that any effort by the central government to adopt
the
kind of one-size-fits-all approach it appears to prefer is doomed to
fail
[http://www.russ.ru/comments/121827526?mode=print].

Mikhail Burdaragin, who regularly surveys the regional media for that
site, found that the issue of the impact of the monetarization of
benefits on the Russian population continues to be a lively issue in
the regional press even though as he points out it is no longer much
discussed by Moscow officials or in the central media.

Sometimes, he notes, the problem is simply that many Russians lack the
funds necessary to pay for medicines they had been able to obtain for
free in the past. But often the problem is exacerbated by the fact that
the only way individuals can gain a hearing is through “public
written appeals” from lower-level officials to more senior ones.

Unfortunately, Moscow has failed to address the problem since the massive street protests ended, and “the distribution of any means in
Russia” -- including medicines – “is most often organized
according to the ‘oblast’ principle, which is convenient but does
not correspond at all to the interests” of either the regions or
particular cities within them.

And that problem in turn is made worse by the fact that the regional
governments lack the money necessary either to purchase and distribute
the medicines their people need or to compensate them as required by
law. Moscow having withdrawn from this effort, “the regions are
forced to survive on their own,” something that is not always easy.

In Yaroslavl, for example, the government has not been able to provide
the necessary medicines even for those who have money or provide
subsidies to those who are still authorized to get such funds to
purchase the drugs and other medical items that they need.

Pharmacists as a result often cannot give anyone the amount of
medicines their doctors have prescribed, and for at least some patients, these
shortfalls may have a serious impact on their health or in the case of
older and sicker ones even put them at risk of dying.

Writing about this situation in despair, the Tol’yatti newspaper “Gorodskiye vedomosti” said that doctors now must remember that “one of their chief tasks is to calm the patient and support him”
not be prescribing medicines but rather by talking to him and thus
helping him to get better.

Such advice, Budaragin notes, leads one to reflect that the Russian
word for “doctor” could be linked to the Russian verb for “lying,”
and he speculates that “the next step in this direction is both
simple and clear: shamans from Buiryatia, Tuva and other regions … ought to be brought in to cure” the sick elsewhere in Russia.

The bitterness behind that observation suggests that the problems
involved with the monetarization of benefits -- difficulties that many
in Moscow and equally many in the West who rely on central sources
alone believe have been resolved -- are far from over not only as a human
problem but a looming political one as well.