Assessment of the efficiency of the health care system in Russia

The purpose of the article is to assess the efficiency of the Russian health care system on the basis of modern analysis tools, in particular, the effective frontier modeling (SFA -Stochastic Frontier Analysis). SFA presents dependence of average life expectancy on health care expenditures, average number of years of study and health risk factors as explanatory variables. Currently, there is a significant lagging of the Russian health care system behind many developed countries by basic health indicators. The method used assumes calculation of health production function that allows assessment of the impact of irrational use of resources on different health indicators. The result of the function is average life expectancy indicator, which represents a linear dependence of a set of explanatory variables. The collected data on 11 countries for the period from 2000 to 2013 show direct dependence of life expectancy on income inequality measured by Ginny coefficient, and inverse dependence on average income per capita and the share of health care expenditure in the total public expenditure. In conclusion there are given recommendations for improving the health care system in Russia. For example, introduction of a system of population co-payment for a certain set of services; creation of a unified system for the use of resources and management in the sphere of medical provision; development of public-private partnership in the health sector, balancing of the Federal and regional health care funding that will contribute to raising the effectiveness of the health care system.