Doesn't take much searching to find evidence for the magnitude...

Doesn't take much searching to find evidence for the magnitude of corruption in the Russian healthcare system. Example below. The contents of the third paragraph are a particular concern.

"Corruption in health care is a threat to Russia's national security in the broadest sense of the word," said Yelena Panfilova, head the Russian branch of Transparency International, a global corruption watchdog.

According to a summer 2006 study commissioned by the group, 13 percent of 1,502 respondents who had sought medical help during the previous year had to pay an average of $90 under the table, out of wages averaging $480 a month. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

Panfilova also said medical and pharmaceutical companies routinely bribed health officials so that hospitals bought their equipment and medicines, even though their quality is often not the best.

Kirill Danishevsky, a health researcher with the Open Health Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has estimated that up to 35 percent of money spent on health care consists of under-the-table payments.