"The reform will not come tomorrow. That is out of the question. We first need two years to work out the technicalities," he said in a report.
The transition period will adjust health services to a shift to new legal and organisational patterns, and allow doctors and nurses to get through postgraduate training.
Modernisation is a must. As the latest opinion probes have it, present-day health services leave as many as 70 per cent of respondents dissatisfied. In the early 1990s, only a half bore grudges, pointed out the minister.
At present, federal and regional health allocations are within a miserly bracket of 2.9-3.1 per cent of the gross domestic product.
Russia needs many new laws if its health services are to make progress-in particular, an updated version of the law on compulsory health insurance, Mr. Zurabov went on.
As the draft bill has it, the compulsory insurance system will be centralised. In particular, insurance policies now valid within a region will be acting throughout the country. Patients will no longer be pestered with questions where they come from, and why they have appeared here at all, Vladimir Starodubov, Mikhail Zurabov's deputy, said to newsmen.
The State Duma, parliament's lower house, will debate the bill somewhere within next year's first three months, he added.
Another two bills, "On Autonomous Institutions" and "On Government/Municipal Autonomous Nonprofit Organisations", envisage an extended range of health service organisational patterns and related legal norms.
Government-financed health services are badly harassed now by scanty grants and stringent accounting. A reform will give them a free hand to plan their revenues and earmark expenditures, and more elbowroom in spending, said Mr. Zurabov.
The reformers are pinning big hopes on another bill, "On Government Guarantees of Health Service", which is to stipulate the service range, amount, terms and practical procedure. It will come as a legislative basis to unify medical standards nationwide, irrespective of where particular services are provided, the minister emphatically remarked.
