9-28-05, 10:10 am

Health care and public education have been two major points of social reform for the Chávez administration in Venezuela. While the private sector has decried the government's promotion of public services in these sectors as cutting into private profit margins, early indicators point to important improvements in health care delivery and general access to educational institutions.


Armando Daniel Rojas, a Vice Minister of Educational Affairs in Venezuela, reported recently that close to 13 million Venezuelans, or almost half of the country’s population, are taking part in new education programs developed by the Chávez administration.

To accommodate the growing demand for education, Rojas discussed plans for bringing as many as 90,000 new teachers into the public education system.

Rojas characterized the educational drive as 'an anti-imperialist philosophical weapon.' President Chávez has consistently called the exclusion of the vast majority of his country’s people from formal education as the theft of the people’s culture, the cruel deprivation of knowledge, and the tool of oligarchical and imperialist rule.

Free public universities, secondary and elementary schools, and local community schools have been built across the country.

For their part, private owners of industry who oppose Chávez’s reforms have criticized the universalization of education. They understand that the labor of educated workers is more valuable, and higher wages will cut into their profit margins.

In the health sector, reports indicate that progress has been much slower. Private Venezuelan doctors, who have traditionally favored the view that medicine is a high-paying career rather than a mission to help the sick and poor, have fought reforms through their opposition parties in the National Assembly and locally.

They oppose the Chávez government’s shift to public medicine and the universalization of health care for the common good not for profit. They ironically describe universal health care as 'anti-democratic,' as a leading member of an opposition party recently said in a speech in the National Assembly.

In their unfortunately twisted view, it seems that limited access to health care available for only those who can pay and widespread illness and sickness is democratic.

The result of the view that profit-based medicine is better has been that, in many sections of Venezuela, the delivery of medical service has lagged behind international standards. According to the UN World Health Organization, there should be 40 hospital beds for every 10,000 people. Venezuela currently stands at 18 beds per 10,000. In remote regions, the average falls to about 7 beds per 10,000. Some regions also report major shortages of nurses and medical staff.

While a tiny public health service has existed for some time in Venezuela, previous governments have cut funding to public hospitals and failed to oversee administration adequately, allowing rampant corruption and theft of public resources.

Under the new reforms, 20,000 doctors (many are Cuban volunteers) and other medical professionals have joined the public system. The government put $6 billion into revitalizing and building the public health and welfare sector last year alone.

An early indication of the success of the reforms is suggested by a drop in the infant mortality rate of 23 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 18 in 2003, and a slight rise in the life expectancy, according to UN World Health organization figures. Venezuela’s infant mortality rate compares favorably to several large urban areas in the US where cuts in public services have seen reduced health care delivery and a rise in infant mortality rates.

Some success with the work that has taken place so far only suggests that progress made in 2004 and 2005 will have produced even better results.

Needless to say, private doctors in Venezuela don’t like the new competition or the goal of the universalization of free health care as it cuts into the profit margins they have been able to squeeze out of the poor and sick in Venezuela.

While the Chávez administration hasn’t called for the elimination of private medicine, its reforms have built hundreds of new free people’s clinics and hospitals, have provided free nutritional advice and food to tens of thousands of urban poor, and aims to establish a free universal public health system that will provide for those left unprotected by the for-profit medical industry.

Chávez argues that 'health isn't a thing to be bought and sold.'



--Joel Wendland can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.