Health Care to Crisis

*Sadly, the photo above is real, and comes from a public hospital in Barcelona, Venezuela.*

Amid a time where socialist policies are receiving historic amounts of support in the United States, many are focusing on the positives that can come from a socialist healthcare system. With all the good, we seem to have forgotten to look at the negative side.

Venezuela is receiving universal criticism for its food shortages and poverty, these have been wrought out of a country that used to be the wealthiest in South America because of its adoption of socialist policy.

One aspect that hasn’t receive much attention in Venezuela is the state of its healthcare. It too is socialist, meaning that it at least theoretically has a universal healthcare system.
Universal healthcare in Venezuela has caused one of the gravest humanitarian crises seen in the region, one that has been deepened by the imminent breakdown of the public health infrastructure and shortages of food, water, electricity, medicine and basic medical supplies.

The socialisation of medical care in Venezuela has seen doctor’s salaries decrease drastically, causing many to shut down their practices. between 2014 to 2018, 14% of instacare facilities were shut down across the country. With shutdowns of other general and specialist practices nearing the same stats.

With the deprivatization of healthcare occurring in 2014, just one year later, the country reported that 15,000 doctors had left the public health care system; citing shortages of drugs, equipment, and poor pay as reasons for there abandonment of the public medical field.

Said one medical journal: “We have rarely seen access to essential medicines deteriorate as quickly as it has in Venezuela except in war zones.” By the end of 2015, the Bolivarian government reported that of all Venezuelans visiting public hospitals in the year, one-of-three patients died

Also in 2015, Venezuela had 30% of all reported malaria cases in the Americas and more even than Brazil, which has a much larger population

There is a private healthcare system in Venezuela, private hospitals and clinics and the qualifications of their medical personnel are comparable to U.S. standards. Private health services are “full to bursting.” Because of a lack of private hospitals in the country, and because the care is objectively better. Overall roughly 1 in 5 Venezuelans have private health insurance. This is caused by a difficulty in getting access to privatised healthcare created by the government in order to keep money flowing in.

Venezuela’s healthcare system is in crisis, and even if it survives, it will never thrive without outside emergency attention.

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