https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/travel-notes-st-petersburg-installment-253
Russian hospitals from the inside – a detailed report
Published by gilbertdoctorow
Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels. View all posts by gilbertdoctorow
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Wishing you a smooth and quick recovery from your injury!
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Excellent report
Very sorry and annoyed to hear that these were the circumstances that lead to your hospitalisation.
Wishing you all the best and pleased that you didn’t infer about any fractures received from the collision.
Were you to overhear any of the hospital staff bemoaning any sense of disruption to their everyday lives following the drone attacks on 3 Yandex data centres, then do tell.
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I am glad that your physician was skilled at chest-tube insertion. Mine was not.
As an intern in 1986-1987 I was unusuallly slick at getting those tubes in with a minimum of patient suffering.
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Get well soon
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In the more than 30 years that I have lived in Russia, I have been hospitalized 4 times for illness and accidents, undergone surgery 3 times in Russian hospitals, and have always been afforded free treatment in both hospitals and in state clinics for an assortment of sicknesses. All “free”. Likewise dental treatment, and mostly before I became a registered foreign resident of Russia. I am still not a Russian citizen.
My state health service treatment had originally been free because there used to be a reciprocal healthcare agreement between the USSR/Russia and the UK, which came into force when the UK State Health Service was being set up in 1948, a postwar goodwill remnant of the WWII alliance of the the UK and the USSR against the Nazi Third Reich, you could say.
However, as of January 2016, this reciprocal healthcare agreement between the UK and Russia is no longer in effect, meaning that visitors to Russia from the UK need to take out private medical insurance.
All Russians have free public healthcare under the Russian healthcare system via Obligatory Medical Insurance (OMI). However, what many foreigners seem to be unaware of is that OMI is also available for foreign residents in Russia both temporary and permanent. Normally employers offer to get a supplementary insurance like voluntary healthcare insurance for the expat residents.
I get a new OMI every December, and the curious thing is, I don’t pay a bean for it: the government pays its contribution, but I am not required to pay any contribution at all. Furthermore, I have not had any earnings since January of this year: until that time I was classed as an “individual entrepreneur”. I am now classed as a pensioner and I receive a Russian state pension, even though, I repeat, I am not a Russian citizen.
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