vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #557 / Social life / Reading article...

The federal law introducing monetary payments instead of social benefits in 2005 hit hard the most vulnerable groups in Russia – pensioners and the disabled. ‘If the government officials do not want to care for disabled citizens, why do they not just take us all out on some boat and let it sink in a city bay,” laments Yuri Safronov, an invalid from Vladivostok who spends hours in lines trying to receive free medicine from the state.

New programs of providing free medicine for people who enjoy social benefits were introduced after the monetary reform took effect in 2005. “I wonder where all the money intended for providing us with drugs has vanished to” Safronov says.

Safronov and his wife Svetlana are both disabled pensioners and obtaining free medicine, or so called ‘social packs’ set by the government, is a hard task.

To receive the necessary prescriptions for medicine, Safronov has to spend a day in a local medical center. The procedure includes getting a special coupon at the registration check-in, consulting a specialist who writes up the prescriptions, and submitting the documents for approval by a special medical commission. All three stages mean standing in lines for hours, which is not easy for elderly people.

“While I was standing in the line today, three people fainted and were taken for medical assistance,” he says. On that day the pensioner failed to receive the desired prescription for his medicine due to some mistake made in registration documents, which meant he had to stand the whole procedure again.

However, the humiliation process does not stop at this point, since the number of drugstores providing free medicine to pensioners and the disabled are limited and the lines are much longer there. Besides, the drugstores often do not have all of the prescribed medicine. Safronov was able to get only three out of nine drugs, with the other six being unavailable. “In the past four months I buy these drugs myself,” he shares.

According to Safronov, people’s callousness and disregard for pensioners’ problems is most offensive. When addressing the drug-store director asking where he can get the necessary drugs, the elderly man was told: “Ask Zurabov.”



Meanwhile, the much criticized Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail Zurabov stated last week that he did not intend to stop the program, which has proved to be so ineffective.

Moreover, Zurabov forwarded to the Russian Government another initiative aiming to change the current pension system. The proposal targets the removal of the current pension savings system and uses the already saved money of pensioners to cover the Pension Fund’s deficit. The proposal, which is to be considered by the government in April, has already received much criticism from officials, including State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov and Economics Development and Trade Minister German Gref.