Health Care Goes From Free to Feeble in Russia

摘要

Expectant mothers in Moscow wait up to six weeks for ultrasound scans, up from three days a year ago. Hospital outpatients pay for blood tests or X-rays that were free last year. And Marif Alekberov, 27, a fireman with leukemia, was told to find $23,000 to help pay for a bone marrow transplant. "His kidneys are about to fail," says his mother, Tatiana Filyeva, who was turned away repeatedly by officials in the Rostov region as she appealed for help and even wrote to President Vladimir Putin. A transplant, she says, "is his last hope."