Recognizing that health policy was imbedded in the larger socioeconomic context, the debates around the Health Insurance Act, which began in the 1990s in the Russian Parliament, examined such factors as the centralization of sociopolitical institutions; the extensiveness of the decision-making role of government for individual lifestyles; the economic organization of competing insurance markets; and market distribution vs. government monopoly of medical goods and services. Several of the provisions of the Health Insurance Act of Russia attempted to revise the model of Soviet socialized medicine prevailing at the time of Perestroika.