100 DAYS OF STEEM - My Local Health Service

I live in Honduras, which is to say I live in a poor third world country so the public health service, while existing is lacking in all aspects. For years, due to the neo-liberal policies that have been forced on the governments the move has been to privatize health services. This has not been completely possible, their still is a large coverage of public health facilities all over the country.

But we are faced with that classic problem of all countries, corruption, the public health budget is quite large so it is an automatic target for corrupt government officials, so what is already a system in bad shape becomes even worse. In the town where I live we have a quite modern public hospital which was donated by the Republic of Korea and built on land donated by Dole Fresh Fruit.

Of course the Korean donation included state of the art medical equipment but as far as I know a lot of it was just left to break down or in some cases it was actually stolen. The hospital in itself is a nice modern building, but it does have problems with not enough personnel, people given jobs because of political affiliations and not for qualifications, lack of equipment, lack of materials, so in reality I can say it is just better than nothing, it could be improved so much. Again I insist, we need honesty in the government and a large slashing of the military budget, we are not at war with anyone and even if we were to get into one the US would stop it immediately, so we don't need a large modern army. And our health and eduaction services do need that money.

Then we also have social security, they also provide free medical services for people who do pay their quotas into the SS system. The health services provided by them are not even up to public health services standards, but their facilities are not as crowded so you can get a faster response. Again most people want medicine but all they have in both PH Services and SS are basic medicines, anything else you have to buy at drugstores.

Right now with the COVID 9 menace we are facing possibly some terrible times, when it started we were told there were less than 100 ventilators in the country, I have no idea if more have been bought or if some country has donated any, but the thing is if as expected this pandemic hits over ten thousand people we are going to need way more than 100 ventilators, and remember these units have probably been in storage so maybe at least a few of them don't work.

So over all I would say we have a very weak health system, private hospitals and medical centers offer better service but they are absolutely out of the budgets of 80% of the country so I don't see them as an alternative. Health insurance is mostly provided by employers, you can buy health insurance from several companies but I don't really know if these are any good.

I believe this is more or less a truthful account of public health services in this country, its not even mediocre, but in the end it is better than nothing.