Between a rock and a hard place: the question of money at St. Petersburg women's clinics.

The new financing mechanisms introduced into the Russian health care system since the beginning of the 1990s have not resolved its severe financial problems. This article examines the consequences for outpatient services and the daily work of individual doctors in St. Petersburg, using women's reproductive health services as a case example. Interview and observational data reveal a constant opposition between formal rules and informal practices at both the administrative and polyclinic levels. Polyclinics for women's reproductive health services have developed various strategies as a response to insufficient financing, but many of these strategies are questionable within the current mandatory health insurance system. Ordinary doctors perceive the development as mainly negative. The results raise the question of increasing arbitrariness, from patients' perspective, in the health services provided. The study illustrates how in a post-socialist context, the past constantly permeates the present in the form of novel adaptations to the new social context.