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1 In 3 Patients Admitted To Venezuelan Hospitals Die

REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

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Robert Donachie Capitol Hill and Health Care Reporter
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The government of Venezuela reports that one out of three Venezuelans who are admitted to public hospitals died in 2015.

This is yet another story in a slew of bad news for Venezuela. Inflation has become so bad that the government ordered millions of pounds of provisions (in the form of the Venezuelan currency, the Bolivar) to be dropped by planeload across the nation. The government even put its own military in charge of the country’s food supplies.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, the Venezuelan people now have a 33 percent chance they will not leave the hospital alive.
There are 40 percent fewer operational hospital beds in the country since 2014, and the nation is experiencing a massive shortage of 85 percent of medicines. Some 30 percent of children in Venezuela suffer from malnutrition, according to News 24.
A four-year-old girl, suffering from a minor knee scrape, nearly died in a two-month-long saga that saw mistreatment, shortages of life-saving antibiotics and other medications, and hospital buildings that looked more like drug dens than places of healing.
For every 1,000 live births, Venezuela experiences 15 deaths, a rate more than double the U.S., which has just six deaths per 1,000 live births.
The news of Venezuela’s eminent downward spiral comes as a shock to those familiar with the nation.
Prior to the socialist government instituted by Hugo Chávez, Venezuela was once the richest country in Latin America and in the top 20 wealthiest countries in the world. The nation had a thriving economy and culture.

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