Venezuela’s Health Care System Ready To Collapse Amid Economic Crisis.
Marcos Carvajal, a 34-year-old former pitcher for the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins, died of pneumonia on Tuesday. He fell sick in December, but the antibiotics needed to treat the illness were hard to find. Drugs for Carvajal eventually were sent from abroad but he relapsed, returned to the hospital on Monday and died the next day.
The Pharmaceutical Federation of Venezuela estimates the country is suffering from an 85 percent shortage of medicine amid an economic crisis also marked by severe hyperinflation and food scarcity.
The entire Venezuelan health care system is on the verge of collapse, says Francisco Valencia, head of the public health advocacy group Codevida. Some hospitals lack electricity, and more than 13,000 doctors have left Venezuela in the past four years in search of better opportunities.
“They don’t give food to the patients in the hospital,” Valencia tells Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd. “They don’t have the proper medical supplies to take care of the people who go to the emergency [room] like gloves, like every basic thing they need for an emergency.”
It seems like ages since Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, et al., commented on the Bolivarian workers’ paradise.
Few doctors, little working equipment, limited to vanishing medicines. What do they mean “ready” to collapse? All that’s left is for the buildings themselves to collapse. The dying Venezuelans must be tired of hearing nothing when they silently appeal to the U.N., UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Sanders, Penn, Moore, and all the other glad handing groups and individuals they’ve always heard would rush to their aid. Pissants, all of them.
h/t SG