One, kill our, obliterate our system of universal health that is the Caja, simply because it is costly, inefficient, corrupt and has a license to kill much like “007”.
And, two, the entire healthcare system is rampant with corruption from management to the doctors and to the bribes to just make an appointment.
Almost every Tico and expat alike who must, by law, pays into the health insurance euphemistically provided in good will since 1947 for a healthier population, which has “collapsed”. it collapsed years ago and we keep on breathing air into a dead horse.
Recent examples:
1) Critical echo-cardiogram in July, that is July 2016 (After ICE installs the phones)
2) Ruptured hernia surgery: March 2016
3) Cardiac catheterization: 823 must wait in line until 2017
4) Dedicated physicians involved with a pizza store selling human organs to Israel.
5) The person who blew the whistle on double, triple billing the purchase of unused resources; ostracized…blacklisted.
6) The surgeon who left his patient wide open, a little boy, still performs cardiac surgery although he left his patient to take a cell phone and scurry over to Cima to perform a more financially rewarding appendectomy. The boy died.
7) Chief of Cardiology at Hospital Mexico who blew the whistle that it 800+ wait to receive the life saving cauterizing for coronary patients and of those patients 141 more than likely died while waiting is being blacklisted.
8) At Hospital Max Peralta in Heredia, the latest issue is that patients have been left in wheelchairs with cardio arrests to die.
Dr. Peter F. Brucker, the father of Modern Management said, “…every organization out grows its ability to be managed.”
The Caja is our perfect example.
It started out to be both meaningful as well as essential not to mention something for what the world to assimilate in universal healthcare. However, we are now a decrepit political football that as a valued institution might very well be better off destroyed and re-started again, but this time serving its patients rather than the pockets of the corrupt, the inflated egos and the administrative inefficiencies.
Corruption has become a culture, a “Thing.” Those who work within this unorganized bureaucracy have a golden opportunity to steal, pilfer and plunder. It is all too easy and justified to make ends meet in the 4th most expensive country in Latin America (Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay and Pura Vida in that order.) “We need to steal a little to keep our (Economic) heads above water.”
The infrastructure is there, well almost, it now takes heavy hammered management to attend to those of us who faithfully pay into the Caja insurance program as prescribed by law and an undeniable source of health for those who need it.
I recently personally witnessed a Caja hospital in action. I took a very close friend to a Caja hospital after her doctor told me to take her to the emergency room immediately. We sat in the waiting area for 7 hours waiting for a doctor to see her. She was in unbelievable pain. An ambulance pulled up a bit later and the attendants pulled a gurney off, brought it into the waiting room and put the patient on chair. The patient had a bullet wound in his stomach and was bleeding through the dressing that been applied by the ambulance attendants. He sat there for two hours before a doctor saw him. I thought he was going to bleed to death. As for my very close friend. She died in that hospital 23 days later at the age off 33 in her sweat soaked sheets and hospital gown. No diagnosis or prognosis was ever given by her attending physicians. Their answer was always: “We are waiting for test results”.
Eighteen days for an MRI and biopsy result???????
One significant wasted expenditure is the over-stocking by the CAJA of some prescription drugs. Several years ago, I remember seeing pictures on the news of front-end loaders, loading tons of expired prescription drugs into dump-trucks in a CAJA warehouse, to be taken to a landfill.
This is absolutely asinine! I heard a story from a friend last night about his wife and their recent horrible experience in a hospital. What can be done? Who has to push the restructure of an acceptable caja? These stories are what makes a lot of people want to leave here. If enough do relocate that would be devastation to the country financially I would think.
Come on, you can do better than this, can’t you?
Anyone can compile anecdotes illustrating failures with the Caja–there are a lot more of them than you list–but to leap from the anecdotes to the conclusion that the system has “collapsed” is both illogical and factually wrong. Despite its anecdotal failures, the Caja actually works well for tens of thousands of patients every year, and does so at very low cost. A serious criticism of the Caja, which yours is not, would require a much fairer and more thoughtful analysis of the facts.
Most disturbing though is that you offer NO SOLUTION, none whatsever. If you want to gripe, go sit on a bar stool or join the others who gripe in the comment section. If you want to be taken seriously, however, how about proposing a solution?
As it is you just foul the public air with sophomoric complaining.