From Indimar Rivero, a Venezuelan woman whose 39-year-old husband died because he needed a heart valve, but operating rooms in Venezuela have no heart valves, catheters, or working blood processing machines:
If they had found what they needed, surgical material and the valve, I believe that God and the doctors would have saved him. But in the end, they sent him home.
The Wall Street Journal, “Venezuela’s Failing Health,” 3/14-15/15
Free, quality health care was supposed to be a centerpiece of Venezuela’s socialist system, but like virtually everything else under its benighted government, it has fallen apart. The country has 45,000 public hospital beds, but only 16,300 are operational. The country needs to import an estimated $1 billion a year in medical equipment and supplies. Last year, it imported $200 million; the government simply has no foreign currencies, particularly dollars, with which to pay for imports, although Venezuela has one of the world’s largest reserves of oil. Recent medical school graduates make about $50 a month, and many of them are fleeing the country. President Maduro called one of Venezuela’s leading doctors, Angel Sarmiento, a terrorist because he told the press that eight deaths in a single public hospital were possibly linked to the same pathogen. Doctor Sarmiento has been in hiding ever since.
Soon, it is to be hoped that the people of Venezuela revolt and overthrow their socialist masters. And it is to be hoped that those who then steer their country’s course will realize that there is no such thing as free, quality health care, and that markets, not governments, provide the best medical care at the lowest cost and give customers the widest range of options (a lesson that will eventually be learned in the US as well). It is a matter of morality, of life and death, and the socialist central planners who have destroyed Venezuelan medicine have blood on their hands.
