ABSTRACT
In 1985, the Health Ministry of the USSR received over 66,000 letters of complaints about the medical service, substantially more than in the preceding year. The "functional" argument presented earlier would justify a higher priority for health care because it keeps the producers working or returns them to work after they have been temporarily incapacitated by illness or trauma. As Dr. Evgenii Ivanovich Chazov indicated, the typical bureaucratic devices used in the economic realm to judge performance are also prevalent in the health system: the chase after quantitative indices and achievements and the neglect of quality. The multiplicity of problems faced by the Soviet health service is also the problems of Soviet society. The heaIth minister deplored the technological back wardness of Soviet medicine and Soviet medical research, complaining for example that not a single Nobel Prize in medicine has been won by a Soviet scientist.
