Posted by Professor Comisso
on March 10, 2009, 1:27 pm, in reply to "Re: Business ethics with doctors "
132.239.208.141
I agree with the observation that corruption is quite rampantin Romania. I believe that the EU has halted various payments to Romania (I know it has done so with Bulgaria, but possibly Romania was spared) just for this reason. But empirically, the level of corruption in Romania as measured by many many indicators is high.
It is NOT true that Romania is now a so-called "communist" country, and indeed, were it so, it would not have a corruption problem of this order, nor would it have been accepted into EU. So those remarks are not correct, and one of the main reasons I myself did not bother to read the article when it appeared in the NY Times is precisely because I know that anyone who writes in a newspaper article that is supposed to be factual clearly is simply repeating what someone has told him/her as opposed to really getting in and understanding what is going on. It is common practice in all of the ex-socialist countries to call anything one doesn't like "communist," and the habit is particularly prevalent with English speakers talking to westerners (such as NY Times reporters and readers) who have no basis for assessing the validity of this clasim.
In the old, socialist days, health care was nominally "free" to everyone. Supply and demand did not match, some doctors were more in demand than others, some services and procedures were in very short supply. This is normal in all health care systems, the question is how you ration care. In the socialist systems, it was common for people to give a doctor a gift, especially if the doctor they were seeing worked at, say, a clinic other than the one to which they were "assigned" (for example, it operated in a neighborhood where the patient didn't live) and where, therefore, the doctor was not required to treat them. These gifts were relatively small and typically in kind (not cash), no physician in a socialist country ever earned anything close to what an MD in the United States or even western Europe did, with or without these payments. Generally, in a country like pre-1990 Romania, accumulating money was not a particularly desirable thing to do, since money did not necessarily give you access to goods. For example, during the 1980s, there were food shortages. In that case, a doctor was much better off if a patient had a relative living in a rural area and came to the doctor's office with, say, fresh vegetab les or a nice duck. (Believe me, it is true).
Now, it is quite possible that people are paying much more in money. But that is because money now matters--you can buy what you want with it, you can excnage it for a foreign currency, you can travel with it. None of this was possible in the old, socialist system. So to the degree services continue to be in short supply, it is hardly surprising people who have money are bidding up the prices. But that, my friends, is the logic of a capitalist market, not a socialist system.
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