American Primary Care and My Soviet Era Class Trip: Sensing the Inevitable Collapse of a Top Down Bureaucracy

By HANS DUVEFELT, MD Swedish Healthcare seemed competent but a bit uninspired and rigid to me but my medical school class trip to the Soviet Union showed me a healthcare system and a culture I could never have fully imagined in a country that had the brain power and resources to have already landed space probes on Mars and Venus by the time my classmates and I arrived in Moscow in the cold winter of 1977. The first time we sat down for breakfast at two big tables in the restaurant of the big Россия hotel near the Red Square, our two male waiters asked if we wanted coffee or tea and people started stating their preferences. The waiters shook their heads and put their hands up in the air. No, they couldn’t split the beverage order, they explained. We had to all decide on one beverage with no substitutions. The restaurant obviously had both coffee and tea, and as far as I know, they cost about the same. The only thing standing between the tea drinkers and their favorite morning beverage (the coffe crowd won the popular vote) was convention and attitude. I don’t know if this was a policy set by the hotel management or a complete lack of service-mindedness by he staff, but my classmates and I felt as if we, the customers, did not matter. (Writing this piece, I came across the news item that the Hotel Rossiya, once the biggest hotel in the world, was demolished in 2006.) From that first morning on, everything I encountered felt dim, dark a...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Medical Practice Primary Care American healthcare Hans Duvefelt Source Type: blogs