Venezuela’s health care crisis overwhelms hospitals in neighboring Colombia
Venezuela’s health crisis is spilling over to neighboring Colombia, where the border town of Cucuta is struggling to provide the medical care increasingly unavailable in the socialist country.
As a result, Cucuta’s main hospital has amassed a monumental amount of debt as it helps out the thousands of Venezuelan patients that arrive every year from across the border. A large number of those are women in labor.
“In the first quarter of 2017, [Erasmo Meoz Hospital] admitted 1,000 Venezuelans. The increasing rate is worrying, as it could come to 4,000 migrants cared for by the end of this year,” said Health Minister Alejandro Gaviria to Bluradio earlier this month.
He said Venezuelan patients have cost Colombia about $1 million the past year.
By law, any patients who arrive at a hospital in Colombia are admitted to the emergency room at no cost — regardless of their nationality.
“In Venezuela they ask you to bring all the medicines [to the hospital where you are going to be admitted] and yet when you go to the pharmacy there is nothing,” Miriam Rivera told Univision. Rivera’s teen son fractured his left clavicle recently when he fell off his bicycle.
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