Maybe the fact that Russia is a communist country. If one spends enough time there maybe that way of life becomes NORMAL to them.
Yeah ... I kinda figured that's where you might be going with it.
Lemme clear a few things up:
My doctor friend, spends some time every year traveling the world, working in various places, generally for around 3 to 12 weeks at a whack. Two of them that I'm aware of are Russia and Indonesia (there were others)
He went to Indonesia - Aceh Province, where the tsunami hit the worst - every year for 5 or 6 years. He was there immediately after the tsunami hit for an extended period of time (months) He's also made some trips to Russia and Eastern Europe. His work in Russia focused on upgrading the practices and procedures (to best practices) in Russian hospitals to avoid and reduce hospital-acquired infections.
Like I said: he
prefers a single-payer system. From what I can gather, this comes about from a lifetime of being a healthcare professional, and traveling and working throughout the world, and actually observing (and working in) various healthcare systems in operation.
How we went from that ... to he's been brainwashed into communism by virtue of being in a nation that was
formerly communist, or in close proximity to people that formerly were, for relatively short periods of time, I'm not quite sure.
Aristotle comes pretty close (apart from the overblown hyperbole) to getting to the issue that might - at least to some extent - somewhat inform the good Doctor's opinion. In 1993 - after the Soviet Union broke apart and ended, a new Constitution was adopted and there was an attempt made to privatize the healthcare system.
Those reforms towards privatization resulted in huge problems, with the healthcare system actually becoming much worse than it was as a totally public system.
Healthcare in Russia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I doubt very seriously, that this is the only thing that informs the good Doctor's opinion ... he's someone that is intensely critical of the medical profession and the healthcare industry ... something that in my experience is rather rare.
If anything, his experiences in Russia, probably only serve to confirm previously existing opinion and thoughts - which are based on a lifetime of working as a healthcare professional - as to how healthcare ought to be provisioned.
