HEADLINE: Health Care in Iraq Was Better Under Saddam Hussein

[Bluebear]

With a special update on all the "hospitals we're building that the media won't show!!!!111111"


By Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch. Posted January 19, 2007.

Almost four years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s healthcare system is still a shambles. Dozens of incomplete clinics and warehoused equipment are a testament to the failed U.S. experiment to reconstruct Iraq.


The convoy of flat-bed trucks picked up its cargo at Baghdad International Airport last spring and sped north-west, stacked-high with crates of expensive medical equipment. From bilirubinmeters and hematology analyzers to infant incubators and dental appliances, the equipment had been ordered to help Iraq shore up a disintegrating health care system. But instead of being delivered to 150 brand-new Primary Health Care centers (PHCs) as originally planned, the Eagle Global Logistics vehicles were directed to drop them off at a storage warehouse in Abu Ghraib.

Not only did some of the equipment arrive damaged at the warehouse owned by PWC of Kuwait, one in 14 crates was missing, according to the delivery documents. The shipment was fairly typical: Military auditors would later calculate that roughly 46 percent of some $70 million in medical equipment deliveries made to the Abu Ghraib warehouse last spring had missing or damaged crates or contained boxes that were mislabeled or not labeled at all.

Not that it really mattered. Just over three weeks before the April 27th delivery, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had canceled the construction of 130 of the 150 PHCs for which the material was intended. As a result, the equipment that could help diagnose and treat Iraqi illness (and escalating bomb or gun injuries) now sits idle waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it....

=====
Most prominent among the long list of failures is the Basra Children's Hospital, which was intended as crown jewel of U.S. aid to Iraq. Instead, it has become a showcase for everything that went wrong. In August 2004, USAID awarded the $50 million contract to build the hospital to Bechtel, a San Francisco-based engineering company, one of the largest engineering companies in the world, which has become synonymous with the building of nuclear power plants, gold mines and large projects like the new Hong Kong airport...

The facility, championed by the First Lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, looked suspiciously like a political propaganda effort. And as with much U.S. aid, it was designed with little local consultation: the city lacked clean water and already has a leukemia ward where lack of funding means that each bed is shared by two or three children...

But like every so many U.S.-initiated projects, the money to build this fancy facility would disappear when things went wrong. A year after the August 2005 groundbreaking, the project became a target for attacks, according to the company. The price tag rose from $50 million to an estimated $169.5 million. Cliff Mumm, president of the Bechtel infrastructure division, predicted that the project would fail. "It is not a good use of the government's money" to try to finish the project," Mumm told the New York Times. "And we do not think it can be finished."

In July 2006, Bechtel was asked to withdrew from the project, which is now on hold...

http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/115856

[lligrd]

1. As I Understand It, Iraqis Had Free Health Care

Which is a lot more than many Americans have today.

[malaise]

2. The only freedom guaranteed to Iraqis

since this illegal invasion is freedom from life. Democracy in the afterlife - Yipeee!