shortages

Venezuela’s crumbling health care system: A killer

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By FRANK BAJAK

MARACAY, Venezuela (AP) — Evelina Gonzalez was supposed to undergo cancer surgery in July following chemotherapy but wound up shuttling from hospital to hospital in search of an available operating table. On the crest of her left breast, a mocha-colored tumor doubled in size and now bulges through her white spandex tank top.

Gonzalez is on a list of 31 breast cancer patients waiting to have tumors removed at one of Venezuela’s biggest medical facilities, Maracay’s Central Hospital. But like legions of the sick across the country, she’s been neglected by a health care system doctors say is collapsing after years of deterioration.

APTOPIX Venezuela Sick Health Care

Doctors at the hospital sent home 300 cancer patients last month when supply shortages and overtaxed equipment made it impossible for them to perform non-emergency surgeries.

Driving the crisis in health care are the same forces that have left Venezuelans scrambling to find toilet paper, milk and automobile parts. Economists blame government mismanagement and currency controls set by the late President Hugo Chavez for inflation pushing 50 percent annually. The government controls the dollars needed to buy medical supplies and has simply not made enough available.

 

Outside Caracas, Chavismo’s unfulfilled promises

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VALENCIA, Venezuela (AP) — It’s just after nightfall and the power is out again in untold hundreds of thousands — probably millions — of Venezuelan homes. If the government knows how many, it’s not saying. It hasn’t issued reports on problems in the public power grid since 2010.

In Venezuela’s third-largest city, Pedro Martinez dons a shirt for visitors drawn by the flicker of candles inside his one-story, cement-block house in a middle-class district. The Caribbean heat is sticky thick inside. A mesh hammock hangs by the front door.

Venezuela Election Hinterlands

“This happens nearly every day,” Martinez says of the blackout, holding a candle close so a reporter can take notes. It’s the day’s second outage. The first struck just after noon.

It’s been like this for five years, pretty much everywhere but Caracas, the capital. Worsening power outages, crumbling infrastructure and other unfulfilled promises witnessed this week in a trip through the country’s industrial heartland could be an important factor in Sunday’s election to replace socialist President Hugo Chavez, who died last month after a long battle with cancer.

Read full article on AP Big Story