Medical care under socialism.
Reynier Urdaneta, 8, cradled a toy guitar and kicked around a blown-up surgical glove as he waited in the bowels of a massive hospital ship for a simple surgery — already once gone wrong in his native Venezuela — that might radically change his life.
He was one of hundreds of Venezuelans being treated by the USNS Comfort, a U.S. Navy vessel floating off the coast of northern Colombia last week. The ship’s medical mission is shining a spotlight on Venezuela’s collapsing health care system amid an economic crisis that has forced some 3 million to flee their country in recent years.
Once one of the region’s wealthiest and most medically advanced nations, Venezuela’s economic free-fall has had a devastating effect on the nation’s health. Ailments like polio, measles and AIDS are resurfacing. Even basic medicine can be hard to find, and hospitals struggle to stay open.
Reynier’s mother, Katiuska Urdaneta, said she scrimped and saved for years so that her son could have a hernia operation last year at a public hospital in Maracaibo, in western Venezuela. In theory, the surgery was free, but she said the hospital was so broke she had to buy all the supplies for the procedure, including sterilized water, scalpels, anesthesia, gauze, gloves and gowns. The surgery cost a small fortune, but less than two months later, Reynier’s twin inguinal hernias — a painful condition in which tissue or intestine bulges through the abdominal wall — reappeared.
As doctors on the U.S. Navy vessel fussed over her son, she said she couldn’t believe her luck. “I thought he was going to have to live with those hernias forever. There was no way we could have ever paid for another surgery in Venezuela.”
The ship was stationed last week off the coast of Riohacha, a Colombian beach town less than 60 miles from the Venezuelan border and, these days, home to more than 50,000 Venezuelans.
Ariel Kaufman, a Venezuelan urologist who moved to Miami in 2014 due to growing insecurity in Caracas, said he’s been overcome with emotion — sometimes cried — as he’s connected with his countrymen.
“I’ve been practicing medicine for 25 to 30 years and nothing fills (my) heart and mind more than helping these people,” he said, as he waited for another batch of Venezuelan patients to be helicoptered onto the ship, “even if it’s with a small surgery or touching someone’s hand.”
Kaufman is part of a contingent of 14 Venezuelan doctors with the Venezuelan American Medical Association, VAMA, who are embedded on the Comfort for this leg of its journey.