In article the issues connected with revaluation of influence of medicine and health care on demographic indicators – the most important numerical characteristics of public health are touched. Research objective: assessment of separate indicators of the state of health of the population at the population level and their dependence on medicine and health care. Methods and sources of information. Mortality given the state statistics is used. Level of excess mortality was defined as a difference between number of the dead from the concrete reasons during the analyzed period of time (2020) in comparison with the same period of time in previous year. When calculating death rate at working-age data of Rosstat on the number of men and women in able-bodied age are used. In work data and metadata on the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (https://stats.oecd.org/), the analytical materials of the Russian and foreign researchers including placed in the Internet, heuristic methods, the content analysis are used. Results. In the Soviet Union the expected life expectancy at the birth reached the maximum in 1964-65 and was comparable to indicators of the USA, Japan and economically developed countries of Europe. The analysis of the current demographic situation shows that against the background of significant lag of Russia from economically developed countries on an indicator of the expected life expectancy at the birth, for the last three decades the curves reflecting dynamics of number of death and births in Russia were three times crossed. After the short period of comparability of indicators of mortality and birth rate, since 2016 in the country reduction of population which scales have the menacing character and which cannot be explained with COVID-19 pandemic completely is again observed. Conclusions. Good population (public) health has to be an ultimate goal of activity not only structures of health care, but also all other participants of a system of the social and economic relations in modern Russian society.