Introduction. - Worker Protection and Benefits 6

CONTENTS

Contents

1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………..….. 3

2. Social Welfare ………………………………………………………….…… 4

- Pensions …………………………………………………………………....… 4

- Worker Protection and Benefits …………………………………………… 6

- Homeless ……………………………………………………………………... 10

3. Health ……………………………………………………………….............. 12

- Health Conditions ……………………………………………….…………. 12

-Maternity, Infant Care, and Birth Control ……………………….............. 14

-Alcohol, Narcotics, and Tobacco …………………………………………… 16

-Aids …………………………………………………………………………… 19

- The Health System ………………………………………………..………… 20

4. Conclusion ………………………………………………………..……….. 26

5. Literature ………………………………………………………………….. 27

Introduction

As Russia makes the transition from a command economy to a partial free-market system, the provision of an effective social safety net for its citizens assumes increasing urgency. A 1994 World Bank report described the current social-protection system as inappropriate for the market-oriented economy toward which Russia supposedly was striving. Among the major shortcomings noted in the report were the continued major role played by enterprises as suppliers of welfare services, as they had been in the Soviet period; the absence of any coverage for large groups of people and the inadequate level of benefits in some regions; a growing disparity between a shrinking wage base and the demands placed on the system; and the failure to target the neediest recipients. As the economic transition of the 1990s forces more of Russia's citizens into poverty, the state has tried to maintain the comprehensive Soviet system with severely constrained resources.

The system's inefficiency is exacerbated by its fragmentation. As in the Soviet period, allowances and benefits are administered and financed by diverse agencies, including four extrabudgetary funds, several ministries, and the lower levels of government. The Ministry of Social Protection is the primary federal agency handling welfare programs. However, that ministry focuses almost exclusively on the needs of people who are retired or disabled; other vulnerable groups receive much less attention. The four extrabudgetary funds that provide cash and in-kind social welfare benefits at the federal level are the Social Insurance Fund, the Pension Fund, the Employment Fund, and the Fund for Social Support.

Russia has an entrenched, albeit underfunded, system of socialized medicine. Basic medical care is available to most of the population free of cost, but its quality is extremely low by Western standards, and in the mid-1990s the efficiency of the system continued the decline that had begun before the collapse of the Soviet system. In the first four post-Soviet years, that decline was typified by significant increases in infant and maternal mortality and contagious diseases and by decreases in fertility and life expectancy.

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