Students were told to have good insurance coverage. "Good" meant "it includes flying you to Finland and paying for hospitalization there." Many were billed for their care. Depended on the politics of the situation. If they were on friendship visits, then their care was PR and they made the news as an example of how wonderful the system was. If not, it varied by efficiency and political demands.
Polikliniki or "polyclinics" were everywhere and gave the usual vaccinations. They were often in short supply. Mostly they set bones, dealt with things treated with some pills, or told people to go home and let the virus run its course. They'd also handle abortions and birth control. There's no way to tell how safe the abortions were--the statistics were top secret and if unfavorable simply reported at odds with reality, as with most things (the government decided what the truth was). The polikliniki were billed as the best healthcare on Earth, so few complained. If they are already admired by everybody, nobody could do better. Think of them as "general practitioners." They were more likely to be free to visitors than hospitals. They were certainly provided better care for the commoners than was readily available in 1918, but you'd have to be pretty destitute in the West to get that kind of care.
Hospitals came in two varieties. There were those for important people--defined not as "wealthy" but as "politically connected." The two words were often interchangeable, and when they weren't political power made money unimportant. (You could pay the same rent for a small 1-bedroom walk-up apartment on the fourth floor you shared with your spouse, mother, and 3 kids as for a large three-bedroom apartment you shared with your spouse and budgie; you could pay so much per pound for pork and get ground up shoulder or loin.) They had medicines, often imported from the West, better doctors, private rooms or rooms not shared by many other people, and better equipment and food.
The hoi polloi hospitals in the '50s and '60s had only wards. No private rooms (except in smaller cities without top-tier hospitals), but wards. Most Americans have to look up what the word even means. The lucky would only share a room with 3-4 other people, all suffering from different things. As of the '70s, it wasn't uncommon for people to have to bribe the doctor for more attention or for scarce medicines, and families routinely brought in food and clean linens. And, again, the populace was convinced they had it better than every place else. If a leader came to the West for treatment, it couldn't make the news there.
Things were a bit different--mostly worse--in the late '80s. And always, if you were outside of certain cities, no matter how large the city, it was worse. Moscow and Leningrad, the best. Akademgorodok and a few other smaller places, good. Kazan' and Kiev, not just horrible. Tula? Sverdlovsk? Gor'kii? Just don't get sick there.
Moving to privatized healthcare in former Soviet and Soviet bloc countries mostly just changed who was privileged. The fall of the Iron Curtain meant that Western drugs and procedures could be easily imported. It also meant that health care at the bottom end got worse--but a lot of health care was really crappy. Things like setting bones, though, became more expensive. Overall, an improvement. But if we weight the bottom 10% properly, we can define it was a worsening. It's all in the definitions. In Russia, they have universal care, but it's sort of still dependent on what you can afford, who you are, and where you live. And, again, getting the real numbers is a bit of a bear: They were available for a while, but the government is again into the truth-definition business. Left or right, it's a question of people: The Soviet "kto kogo?" still works; I paraphrase it using another Soviet saying, "In capitalism, it's the oppression of man by man--while under communism, it's the other way around."
Real life Trumpster question, who doesn't see anything wrong with US being a Russian subsidiary...
= new reply since forum marked as read
