That is very sad. I remember growing up in USSR, they had very good doctors. They didn't have carpeted hospitals, TVs in every hospital room, or fancy technology but doctors were good.
I remember when I was 11 I broke my front teeth on a bycicle. We went to the dentist. He sat me in the chair and said "Well, cosmonaut, let's see what we can do", and he rebuilt my teeth in 2 days. All he got in return from my mom and I were flowers and a thank you. There was no insurance, no co-pays, none of that bullshit. And I still have the same teeth he rebuilt now 20 years later. I heard that doctor moved to live in Canada...
Yeah, I can second that, having been born and spent part of my childhood in the USSR.
The medicine was neither on the forefront of high technology nor equally distributed nor ideal, but the preventive tactics and the highly rigourous, fundamentals-oriented education of the doctors more than made up for it.
It's the same idea as Eastern Bloc polytechnic institutes; why do you think 15 of the 16 bank / capital crime hackers wanted by the FBI are ex-Soviet? It's certainly not because they had access to the latest and greatest Western commercial gear at any point in their education or experience. It turns out that it doesn't matter; the focus was on strong mathematics, computational theory and machine processing. They understand what a buffer overflow is and how to effect one easier, better and faster than their more empirically trained counterparts.
We have a family doctor in his 80s now who still practices medicine in what's left of the state system in Russia. After my parents get frustrated with yet another round with pointless paper-shuffling bureaucrats practising defensive medicine, with their army of office assistants, nurses, medical billing consultants and transcriptionists, they
unfailingly call him for good advice - and it works.
I remember when I was 11 I broke my front teeth on a bycicle. We went to the dentist. He sat me in the chair and said "Well, cosmonaut, let's see what we can do", and he rebuilt my teeth in 2 days. All he got in return from my mom and I were flowers and a thank you. There was no insurance, no co-pays, none of that bullshit. And I still have the same teeth he rebuilt now 20 years later. I heard that doctor moved to live in Canada...