There are many ways for a revolution to fail. Most of them revolve around a growing dissatisfaction among the middle classes that eventually reaches the lower classes, the proletariat--the ones the revolution claimed it existed to help.Palacios, Venezuela's largest public maternity hospital and once the nation's beacon of neonatal care, has fallen on hard times. Half of the anesthesiologists and pediatricians on staff two years ago have quit. Basic equipment such as respirators, ultrasound monitors and incubators are either broken or scarce. Six of 12 birth rooms have been shut.Leftist revolution is a temporary situation. The inevitable collapse always follows an extended period of progressive deterioration of basic services and quality of life. Even without corrupt dictators such as Chavez and Castro, leftist systems of governments inevitably fail, due to a lack of grounding in basic economic realities.
On one day last month, five newborns were crowded into one incubator, said Dr. Jesus Mendez Quijada, a psychiatrist and Palacios staff member who is a past president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation...The deaths of the six infants "were not a case of bad luck, but the consequence of an accumulation of circumstances that have created this alarming situation," Mendez said.
...the problems at Concepcion Palacios are symptoms of a variety of ills that have beset the public healthcare system under leftist firebrand President Hugo Chavez. Cases of malaria nearly doubled between 1998, the year before Chavez took office, and 2007. Incidents of dengue fever more than doubled over the same period.
Poorly paid doctors regularly demonstrate at hospitals from Puerto La Cruz in the northeast to Maracay in the industrial heartland, demanding back pay and protesting the lack of equipment and supplies. Others are leaving in droves for Spain, Australia or the Middle East, where they make 10 times the $600 monthly average salary they earn in public hospitals.
... the system's current crisis comes as the country is awash in oil wealth, a windfall that critics say could be used to ease the problem. Instead, Chavez is building a parallel health program called Barrio Adentro, which features 11,000 neighborhood clinics staffed mainly by Cuban doctors...Inaugurated nationwide in 2003, Barrio Adentro initially was so popular with the poor that it helped Chavez win a crucial 2004 referendum and hold on to power. It has brought basic healthcare to the barrios, providing free exams and medicine as well as eye operations that have saved the sight of thousands.
But the system siphons resources and equipment away from the public hospitals, which have four-fifths of the nation's 45,000 hospital beds and where the public still goes for emergency and maternity care, as well as for most major and elective surgeries.
The finances and organization of Barrio Adentro are "a black box and not transparent, so it's impossible to analyze it for efficiency," said Dr. Marino Gonzalez, professor of public policy at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, the capital.
A lack of openness has affected other facets of public health too. After the medical establishment blamed him for an outbreak of dengue fever last summer, Chavez halted weekly publication of an epidemiology report that for 50 years had tallied occurrences of infectious diseases nationwide....Former Health Minister Rafael Orihuela says the loss of the weekly report has deprived the government of information needed for a quick response to outbreaks of disease.
"I am not talking about a failure of the government to adopt innovations in healthcare," said Orihuela, a Chavez critic. "I am talking about a failure to maintain basic healthcare standards." ___LAT
How odd that so large a proportion of professors, journalists, and politicians in the developed western world should be addicted to the perpetually failing ideology of the left. Barack Obama, the audacity of hope? The futility of empty wishful thinking.
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