Priorities of the Russian health care reform.

The introduction of health insurance system has been the core of the Russian health care reform. It has coincided with the decentralization of the state administration. The reform has thus been decentralized, and the transition has been fragmentary and incomplete. As a result, the existing health financing system is eclectic and contradictory. Meanwhile, the reform has had a positive stabilizing influence on financing of health care under conditions of continued economic crisis. The new priorities of the reform should be to balance the financial flows and the state's obligations, and to increase the efficiency of the use of resources through encouragement of competition, assurance of transparency of public funding, development of health care planning, and shift from inpatient to outpatient care.