Tuesday, August 25, 2009

What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us

This is an important -- and thought-provoking -- article. The author is Yuri N. Maltsev, who worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reform team before defecting to the United States.

"In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal "cradle-to-grave" healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The "right to health" became a "constitutional right" of Soviet citizens.

The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would "reduce costs" and eliminate the "waste" that stemmed from "unnecessary duplication and parallelism" — i.e., competition."

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