Comparing Hospital Escuela to Hospitals in the Soviet Union

After reading my post on Hospital Escuela, the teaching hospital in Tegucigalpa and the only hospital in Honduras admitting patients free of charge, someone compared the conditions in Hospital Escuela to conditions in the Soviet era hospitals in Russia. Hospitals in the Soviet Union were neither clean, nor comfortable, nor were the patients treated in a terribly humane manner. Similarly to Hospital Escuela, a room in a Soviet era hospital usually housed between 5 and 12 patients with no privacy a single toilet on a given floor. Many wards, including the pediatric ward, did not allow any visitors at all. As terrible as those conditions appear to an average American, they cannot compare to Hospital Escuela and the Honduran health system.

In Communist Russia, healthcare was free including any tests, procedures or surgeries required. With very rare exceptions all hospitals and clinics were free. While shortages of medicine were not unheard of and have become more frequent since the collapse of the Soviet Union, most common medicines were usually available, and all medicine was affordable to an average citizen.

Honduras has only one hospital where a patient can stay and hope to be treated for free, and the patient still has to pay for any tests often required prior to any surgeries. Armed guards are stationed by the heavy gates of the hospital, and they decide who can go into the hospital and who cannot. Besides Hospital Escuela, Honduras does have some free or low cost clinics where poor people can be seen by a doctor or a nurse. However, any medications are not free even at these clinics, and even if the clinic has the medication in stock, which is rare, typical patients cannot afford to fill their prescriptions.

Most doctors in the Soviet Union were very well trained. Occasionally the lack of proper equipment, especially in smaller towns out in the Eastern part of the country limited the doctors’ ability to treat patients. In Honduras, a budding doctor does not have to do residency, and most of the newly graduated medical students choose to skip it.

While the Soviet Union did experience vast shortages of food in the 1920’s and 1930’s, as well as during the Second World War, resulting in starvation across vast regions of the country, there was no starvation during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Excluding high ranking officials feeding off corruption, citizens of the Soviet Union were equally rich or equally poor. In Honduras, a lot of patients admitted to the Hospital Escuela suffer from malnutrition on top of whatever their ailments might be. Many children suffer from chronic gastrointestinal problems due to lack of clean water.

I am not advocating a free healthcare system, nor do I intend to defend a Communist way of life. The Soviet Union healthcare was far from “state of the art”. Yet by comparison, an average Soviet citizen had access to much better medical treatment then an average Honduran citizen does today.