The Cost of Medical Care

I found out today that my interns, the Claudias, are moving to another unit tomorrow after a 20 day stay in the Unidad de Infectoligia. At first I was quite worried, thinking "How am I going to deal with this, the reason I enjoy work right now is because I like the two girls so much, oy oy oy..." But I've adopted a "this is the way things work" attitude in my time here, since the decision about whether I follow the chicas to their next assignment or stay in my current unit is out of my hands. It's just that it's hard to have to build a relationship with two new interns, especially after I was just getting close to these two. Oh well.

Today I was asking Claudia #1 a little bit about how the healthcare system works. As I've been stressing over and over again, the Hospital de Clinicas treats the poorer people in the system, and it functions as a sort of social welfare system. This is reflected both in the cost and quality of treatment. Apparently, if patients do not have "seguro" (insurance) it costs them *ba dum ching* 20Bs per day to be interned in the ward. For those not familiar with the conversion, that's about $2.5 a day. I know that the cost required of patients does not amount to the cost spent on a patient, but I was doing a bit of research, and the cost per patient per day in U.S. hospital is more than $1000 a day, on average, and for patients with bedsores it is more than $2000. I can't find the cost per patient per day for the Bolivia hospitals, but I can guess that it's around $50 a day. (This website indicates the cost per patient per day in countries such as Tanzania, Kenya, and India is less than $20 a day.)

Also, today when I stopped in for a brief chat with Dr. Revollo, he said his usual "Ohhhh Nadine, deliciosa!" and then followed it immediately with "Did you eat some seafood with garlic last night? I can smell it!" I had to stop and think for a minute, and then remembered that I'd made and eaten roasted garlic. Embarrassed, I told him "Yes, but I brushed my teeth?" He just smiled and said "It's in the blood."