Primary elections are right around the corner with presidential candidates promoting policies that appear very promising. Many people question the effectiveness of policies advocated by democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
One of Sanders’s widely known advocated policies is universal healthcare, meaning all residents of a particular country or region are guaranteed access to health care .
Voters can be open to examine Costa Rica’s government-run healthcare system as a working model of total health coverage.
The system proves to be effective as it provides health coverage to 90 percent of its population, student nurse Vanessa Ruiz Pizarro said at a presentation regarding Costa Rica’s healthcare system at the private school she attends in Costa Rica, Universidad Hispanoamericana.
Pizarro said Costa Rica is one of the countries considered as a “blue zone” with people living to be older than 100. Costa Rica has a 4.7 percent mortality rate and a 79.83 life expectancy at birth as a result of the country’s intent to keep its people healthy.
Health care services are provided to anyone — independent workers, domestic service personnels, same-sex couples that are within family benefit, minors, pregnant women, the elderly, people with disabilities and those without a steady income or legal status in the country.
Pensions are also provided to people with disabilities, orphans and widows.
The public services provided have “three levels of attention”, the first level is the “Level of Prevention” where people go for “basic attention, cure and rehabilitation.”
“There are 110 thousand clinics people go to when they’re sick with the flu or other certain illnesses,” Pizarro said.
Forms of prevention include education and rehabilitation programs, “comprehensive care programs” for drug addicts.
Sex education is also offered under the first level of prevention. Ruiz said that in Costa Rica there’s been an increase in teen pregnancy. The Tico times, a Costa Rican newspaper source said 60 percent of Costa Rican girls have their first sexual relation before 15 years old.
As a result there are more discussions under the topics of sex such as sexual abuse and use of protection to students as young as 12 years old.
“They provide teens with birth control that will last three years,” Pizarro said. Pizarro said that even with more access to birth control the growth in teen pregnancies continues to grow because teens don’t simply take advantage of the birth control.
Other services free to women are sterilization. “It’s free, and they keep you super-informed about it,” Karla Caballo the Resident Director for the American Institute for Foreign Study in San Jose, Costa Rica, said.
The “second level of attention” includes specialized consultation services, internment and medical and surgical treatment of basic specialties. These specialized services include: general surgery, pediatrics, gynecology, internal medicine and obstetrics.
The “third level of attention” consists of complex and medical surgical treatments with six hospitals specialized to women, children, geriatrics, two hospitals for psychiatry, and rehabilitation.
“In Costa Rica, our system has its flaws,” Ruiz said. “But we make the best of what we got.”
Throughout Costa Rica there are public and general hospitals with one problematic difference between both hospitals.
Wilbirth Cedeño, a student nurse at the private school he attends in Costa Rica, Universidad Hispanoamericana, said, “The is the time it takes for someone to be checked, it takes a bit longer at a private hospital.”
With free healthcare in place Pizarro said possible issues nurses run into is being overqualified with no employment to execute their skills. “But many (nurses) can still find jobs like being consultants or having private practices,” Pizarro said.
“Like most systems in the world–nothing is perfect,” Pizarro said.
Any candidate with a “perfect” healthcare system is almost impossible to find, but speculating Costa Rica’s system that has almost perfected their own is relatively close to perfection.
