Venezuelan Government Invests in Humanist Healthcare, Expands National Health Service
By Rachael Boothroyd
Macuto, September 6th 2011 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – This Sunday the Venezuelan Health Minister, Eugenia Sader, affirmed that the Bolivarian government would construct over 1,200 public healthcare projects throughout the county in an attempt to expand the existing national health service.
Sader made the announcement during the inauguration of a new high-tech maternity and paediatric department in the Angulo Rivas hospital, Anzoátegui state. Built as part of the government’s “Baby Jesus Mission”, which focuses on the health of pregnant women and newborn babies, the hospital has an emergency room, as well as 12 specialist incubators, and cost around 9.5 million Bolivars (US$ 2.2 million) to construct.
“The president (Hugo Chavez) inaugurated 42 diagnostic centres in June, 10 new Barrio Adentro II clinics in August, and for September we have another 15,” said Sader, who remarked earlier this month that within the next two to three years private clinics should no longer be needed in Venezuela.
According to the health minister, not only does the government aim to provide a free and universal health service, but also a “dignified environment, advanced equipment and specialised personnel” who are committed to treating patients with “love and human care”.
“That’s the difference between capitalist medicine and socialist medicine: love, and free medical attention, the power to provide cutting edge technology to all of our newborns,” said Sader.
Projects funded by the government will include renovations and extensions of existing clinics, the creation of more diagnostic and Barrio Adentro centres, and the construction of at least 24 new hospitals.
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who has just completed his third round of chemotherapy in Venezuela, previously approved massive investments in the healthcare service earlier in June.(MORE) (-details about the Nueva Esparta clinic expansion, at the behest of the local community council, and a report on humanised (mother-child centered) births at Hospital José María Benítez.)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6464(my emphasis)
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Two other articles of note on health care in Venezuela...
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82% of Venezuelans Use Public Health System
Mérida, June 8th 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) - According to a National Statistics Institute (INE) study, 81.8% of Venezuelans, or 22 million people, are using the public health system, and of these 75.4% said they were satisfied with the service.
Elias Eljuri, president of the INE, said this morning that 93.5% of Venezuelans use the Barrio Adentro system, and 71% use the public hospitals. Barrio Adentro is a system of free community based health consultation made possible by an agreement between Venezuela and Cuba, and which involves a large proportion of Cuban doctors.(MORE)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/4504------------------------
Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care
By Steve Brouwer - Monthly Review Press, July 21st 2011
Revolutionary Doctors, a new book by author Steve Brouwer and published by Monthly Review Press, gives readers a first-hand account of Venezuela’s innovative and inspiring program of community health care, designed to serve—and largely carried out by—the poor themselves. Drawing on long-term participant observations as well as in-depth research, author Steve Brouwer tells the story of Venezuela’s Integral Community Medicine program, in which doctor-teachers move into the countryside and poor urban areas to recruit and train doctors from among peasants and workers.(SNIP)
Monte Carmelo is a small village that stretches along a single paved road on a mountain ridge in the foothills of the Andes in the state of Lara. Before Hugo Chávez assumed the presidency of Venezuela in 1999, the road was unpaved and the high school did not exist. According to the 2007 census, its population consisted of 129 families and approximately 700 individuals, nearly all of them supporting themselves by working small parcels of land by hand, or with horses and oxen. That same year nine residents of Monte Carmelo were medical students. Eight were studying Medicina Integral Comunitaria (popularly known as MIC), an intensive six-year course that in English is usually called Comprehensive Community Medicine. A ninth village resident was studying medicine in Cuba. Two more young women from a neighboring hamlet were also in medical school. They were part of a group of sixty-seven students in this agricultural region who were becoming doctors of medicine.(SNIP)
This experiment in training new doctors in (Medicina Integral Comunitaria-MIC) would be worthy of international attention even if the program was limited to the 67 students in this remote coffee-growing region in the state of Lara. But in fact they represent only a tiny fraction of a gigantic effort to transform medical education and health care delivery throughout all of Venezuela. Nearly 25,000 students were enrolled in the first four years of MIC in 2007 2008, and by 2009 and 2010 they were joined by more students, swelling the ranks of students enrolled in all six years of MIC to approximately 30,000. This is almost as many as the total number of doctors who were practicing medicine in all capacities in Venezuela when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998.(MORE)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6368(my emphasis)
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The crap we hear from the corpo/fascist press, the Scumbag Congress and even Democrats is that there is no money. That is bullshit. All the money's going to war profiteers, banksters, the super-idle-rich, and big investors who profit from mortgage fraud, downsizing, outsourcing, looting pension funds, destroying companies and squeezing every last dime out of the poor.
There is
plenty of money. The ravaging of our educational system, emergency services, parks, public health, libraries, environmental and food inspection programs, government science projects like NASA and the USGS, and, all told, multi-millions of government jobs being eliminated in a time of Depression--the dumbest thing we've EVER done--plus the destruction of our manufacturing base and catastrophic loss of jobs--are all
completely unnecessary.
We have thousands of military installations around the world, costing us billions and billions of dollars FOR WHAT PURPOSE? We are involved in FOUR visible wars of such immense injustice and savagery that it boggles the mind. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Colombia.
Iraq: a war of lies with a hundred thousand innocent people slaughtered in the first weeks of bombing alone. Afghanistan: an unwinnable war, the "graveyard of empires," with dozens more civilians slaughtered every week for ten years! Libya: war by presidential fiat, against the legitimate, recognized government of Libya, which had not aggressed against any country. Colombia: they call it the "war on drugs"--but it's really a war on trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, peasant farmers, political leftists, journalists and others, with thousands of murders committed by the Colombian military and its death squads, funded by $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid and--according to recent testimony--U.S./Bush Junta direct participation in the illegal domestic spying used to create "hit lists" for death threats and assassinations, and to monitor judges and prosecutors to suborn the justice system. FOUR wars--all of them wrong! The CIA is meanwhile drone-bombing anybody it goddamn pleases, destroying people and places we know not of.
Billions and billions of dollars drained out of our pockets to fund what is becoming our only industry: war!
And that is not the half of it, as to monstrous misuse of our tax dollars. Our savage prisons are packed with millions of people 75% of whom are non-violent offenders, at the cost of billions and billions of dollars and the ravaging of lives and communities. The racism of it is unbelievable--and the class warfare aspect is equally unbelievable. War criminal Dick Cheney runs around touting his book, mouthing off and getting richer, while minor drug offenders and petty thieves get 30 year sentences in "privatized" prisons, often far from their communities, where accountability is virtually non-existent. Yet more of our money going to the bullies and nazis of private industry.
Venezuela, instead, is spending billions of dollars on education and health care--and is PROSPERING, with high employment, quick recovery* from the Bush-instigated worldwide Depression, dramatic reductions of poverty and THE most equal income distribution in Latin America (according to the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean). Further, Venezuelans were the pioneers of the huge leftist democracy movement that has swept South America and parts of Central America, with leftist governments subsequently elected in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and (until the U.S.-supported coup) Honduras, with an almost in Mexico in 2005. Eliminating poverty, creating prosperity for all, using a country's resources to benefit the people who live there, strong regulation of banks and financial institutions, rejection of Wall Street's evil advice about "austerity," deregulation, privatization and letting the rich loot everybody and everything, protection of "the commons," social spending on education, health care and other progressive programs, cooperation, peace and social justice, are now the PREVAILING POLICIES in Latin America.
Latin America has several centuries of gross and often brutal exploitation by European and U.S. corporations to overcome--but they are
on their way!
And what are WE on our way to?
Venezuela, as the pioneer of this leftist democracy movement, is, of course, reviled by those who rule over us. And here is something in particular that they
don't want you to know about Venezuela. Venezuela has THE most honest and transparent election system in the western hemisphere, while ours is a joke. There is no other way to put it. Private corporate vote counting with 'TRADE SECRET' code, all over the U.S.? I mean, come on. The Koch Brothers get the last laugh?
So, if you want universal free medical care and universal free education and high employment and fair taxation (rather than a free ride for the rich) and a fair trade marketplace (rather than gigantic, unaccountable, transglobal monopolies and their wars), and a return to government "of, by and for the people," know that, a) it IS possible and is happening all over South America, and b) Diebold/ES&S* isn't going to let you have it.
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*(Venezuela had an astonishing economic boom, after the people of Venezuela peacefully defeated the Bush-supported coup attempt in 2002--five straight years of 10% economic growth, despite on-going, USAID-funded efforts to destabilize the country and topple its elected government. One key to this boom was the Chavez government re-negotiation of the oil contracts to give Venezuelans a much better deal (the talks that Exxon Mobil walked out of, with other companies eagerly stepping into the void), and the other important key was use of the oil profits for
social spending. Putting money in the hands of the poor
generates economic activity. During this period, the Chavez government reduced poverty by half and extreme poverty by over 70%, established high employment rates, and decent wages and pensions and began building the health care and educational systems that it is now expanding. Venezuela is nevertheless still too dependent on oil and when the Bushwhack Depression hit, and oil prices plunged from over $100/barrel to $40/barrel, its economy stood still for about 12 months. The progressive boom, spurred by social spending and other policies, was meanwhile just starting in the other leftist-run countries--such as Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia--which not only landed on their feet, amidst the Bushwhack Depression (as Venezuela did) but have dramatically expanding economies. In summary, Venezuela, the first out of the starting block to start benefiting from progressive policies,
had to slow down; it simply could not continue expanding at that rate. But what it is critically important to understand is that Venezuela did NO cuts in social spending even when its economy was at a standstill (2009) and that is WHY it is recovering and starting to expand again, though at a slower pace than the other leftist-run countries. One other thing: Venezuelans rate their own country among the best in the world on their democracy and on their personal welfare and prospects for upward mobility.)
--
**(Here's the situation: In the same month as the Iraq War Resolution--October 2002--the Anthrax Congress passed a bill appropriating $3.9 billion to fast-track electronic voting machines all over the U.S., run by a handful of private corporations, using 'TRADE SECRET' programming code--code that the public is forbidden to review--with virtually no audit/recount controls. Currently, half the states in the U.S. do NO AUDIT AT ALL (check of actual votes against machine totals) and the other half do a completely inadequate 1% audit. Even worse, 80% of these election theft systems are now controlled by one, private, far rightwing-connected corporation--ES&S, which bought out Diebold. Transparent vote counting--the bottom line of democracy--has been lost in the U.S. By contrast, Venezuela uses electronic voting, but it is an OPEN SOURCE code system--anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they additionally do a whopping 55% audit--more than five times the minimum needed to detect fraud in an electronic voting system. Thus, Venezuelans get universal free medical care and we get war.)
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