"Romania’s 20-Year Nightmare: Unraveling Socialized Health Care"

[WhiskeyGirl]

In my other life in Communist Romania, I managed a large intelligence organization that, among other tasks, was charged with keeping alive a nationalized health care system which in the end bankrupted the country and generated popular contempt. That system, very similar to the Affordable Health Care for America Act, was a bureaucratic nightmare. And it still is a nightmare in the former Soviet empire.

A European Union report on post-Communist Romania’s “Health Care System in Transition” stated that this system “devastated the country,” whose infant mortality rate (20.2 per 1,000) was among the highest in Europe and whose death rate was 70% higher that the EU average. The world’s leading general medical journal, The Lancet, reported that even twenty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, “life expectancy at birth is 66 years for Russians; 16 years less than for people in Japan and 14 less than the European Union average.”[ii]

My past experience gave me reason to believe that the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to keep the Affordable Health Care for America Act alive constituted a much needed wake-up call for our conservative movement. Since 2009, when the Democratic Party began surreptitiously nationalizing the U.S. health care system, our conservative movement has done nothing but weep and wail and wait for God in heaven and the Supreme Court on earth to save America from such a calamity.

A few years after Romania was blessed with a nationalized health care system managed by bureaucrats instead of doctors, the country’s hospitals became so badly degraded that there were frequent cases where two people had to be put in the same bed. Sauve qui peut became the catchword of the privileged Marxist nomenklatura, which took its own health care out of the hands of the hospitals destined to serve “the idiots,” as Romania’s president Nicolae Ceausescu called his people. The Communist Party seized the Helias, a hospital built by a Western foundation, and ordained that it exclusively serve the needs of the party nomenklatura. The Securitate, Romania’s version of the KGB, took over a private hospital (named for a Dr. Dimitrie Gerota) and transformed it into a medical center (renamed Dr. Victor Babes) exclusively destined to serve its personnel. So did the Ministry of Defense. In the 1970s, I myself even built a hospital for my foreign intelligence service, the DIE. The hospital had no name and it was hidden away in the Băneasa Forest near Bucharest, to be protected from the eyes of the “idiots.”

read more here - http://pjmedia.com/mihaipacepa/2012/07/06/romanias-20-year-nightmare-unraveling-socialized-health-care/

I've read the best hospitals are no longer available to people with insurance...only the ruling and political classes, and the wealthy.

[WhiskeyGirl]

Romania, Bulgaria health systems are sick from underfunding, understaffing and corruption

BUCHAREST, ROMANIA –  BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — No sutures and other basics; a dire shortage of staff; catastrophic hygiene; then this — a hospital blaze that killed five premature babies. Romania's hospital system is on the ropes.

The Aug. 16 fire that broke out in an intensive care unit killing five premature babies and leaving six others in critical condition is the most compelling example of a health sector reminiscent more of a developing nation than an EU member country.

Romania's hospitals were a nightmare under communism which ended in 1989. But more than two decades after communist rule was toppled and almost four years after it joined the EU, Romania remains one of Europe's poorest countries — and the sorry state of its hospitals reflect that status.

In a revelation sure to add to the controversy, Bucharest Mayor Sorin Oprescu told reporters Monday that only three of Bucharest's 21 hospitals have a fire alarm system. It was unclear whether any have sprinkler systems, but Giulesti hospital — one of the capital's best, where the tragedy occurred — did not.

A massive shortage of medical staff, bribes to doctors and nurses to ensure better treatment, and chronic underfunding or high debts run by hospitals are everyday obstacles that patients need to negotiate. Supply shortages mean that operations sometimes do not get performed if patients do not supply their own bandages, syringes, surgical thread and antibiotics.

read more here - http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/08/23/romania-bulgaria-health-systems-sick-underfunding-understaffing-corruption-873352499/