Translated with AI
Kyrgyzstan's Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Justice, and Director of the National Institute for Strategic Initiatives, Ayaz Baetov, proposed introducing a voluntary co-payment mechanism for medical workers, similar to "tips." This was announced at a meeting of the interdepartmental commission on de-bureaucratization of the state system on August 19, according to the government's official Telegram channel, GOSINFO, as reported by Fergana.ru.
"Tipping a waiter is good manners, but tipping a doctor is a bribe—that's wrong! We're submitting the concept of voluntary co-payment within the framework of financial autonomy to the medical commission (or rather, the interdepartmental commission—Fergana's note) for review," the channel quotes Baetov as saying.
Baetov later wrote on social media that the discussion was not about legalizing tips per se, but rather about the possibility of transparent, voluntary co-payments.
"Experts [at the meeting] noted that voluntary gratitude from citizens to doctors is de facto common today, for example, in maternity hospitals, and that, based on formal grounds, this constitutes a crime, and the doctor can be arrested," the head of the Ministry of Justice explained.
According to him, the meeting discussed the need for a fully transparent "voluntary co-payment" mechanism, should it be introduced: payments would be processed only at the cash register, after medical services have been rendered, under digital control, and only within a set maximum amount—for example, a threshold of 3,000-5,000 soms ($34-$57) was discussed. To prevent the commercialization of this approach, measures such as mandatory signing of voluntary forms and payment only for the medical care received were proposed.
Baetov emphasized that "the job of experts (in the context of debureaucratization) is not to ignore the elephant in the room and raise only convenient issues." Among the inconvenient ones, for example, is the disparity in the cost of medical services between public and private institutions, which leads to doctors leaving for the private sector and abroad, particularly complicating healthcare in the regions. The salary issue is being addressed through various measures, and "voluntary co-payment" was proposed as an additional mechanism for discussion, Baetov explained.
