Lessons from Soviet Medicine‪.‬

After the socialist revolution in Russia, in 1917, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed. The economy was forcibly socialized, including medicine and related industries. The state controlled everything, saying its control was for the benefit of all, and there would be universal health coverage, with a "constitutional right to health" for all Soviet citizens. The elite Communist Party officials trumpeted that everyone would have health services, and the system would eliminate "waste" stemming from what Lenin called "unnecessary duplication and parallelism"; i.e. market competition. As with our present government, Communist Party officials and their intellectual servants found it expedient to exempt themselves from the egalitarian medical system they created and controlled, and to leave it for the gray masses, while they provided themselves with an elite medical system to go along with their elite social positions. While ordinary Soviet citizens, "workers and peasants" in their masters' eyes, died in state-run hospitals, equipment and medicine that could have saved their lives was in the elite facilities, out of ordinary citizens' reach.