Remember I had surgery the last days of August? A tale about State engineered privilege

I never actually told you about this but around October I had to go and pay for the surgery.

Now, my country has two healthcare modes: Private and State funded. It’s as evil as it sounds. As you can imagine Public health (state funded) sucks a lot, there’s deficit everywhere, a huge waiting list for those that need attention and so on and so on. 

This is a completely programmed thing, don’t be mistaken. My country works on a subsidiary system, that makes it so that you’re “Guaranteed the access to” basic services, not “guaranteed rights”... that means that as long as there’s one provider for something then the state can say that things are going just awesome. And that means that what’s happened is that there’s a programmed deficiency in all public systems that has made it necessary to have private health, private education, private everything... and the lobby goes down so hard that our politicians are little but puppets of the companies that run the country really... and so it ends up happening that the lack of good infrastructure and good public services are necessary and a privilege that you need to have to have a decent life...

But I digress.

I’m privileged enough that I’ve been able to pay for private health this past year or so, mainly because I have a contract now and that wasn’t something I had before... and so, when I got the surgery I knew that I was going to end up paying a lot but at the same time it would never be as expensive as if I didn’t have anything. 

And I was super right.

The whole surgery was about 2.250 dollars (reminder here that the minimum wage in my country is about 385 dollars a month), and after the copays and everything what I ended up paying was 192 dollars. It set me off until now, I’m still kind of stretched out money wise, but it was payable (I knew I was getting surgery so I had a little money saved up which helped). 

On the seat next to me whoever was there wasn’t so lucky.

There was a guy grabbing his head and asking the girl on the counter if there was a mistake, if that was before copays or what not. He had to pay around 3.300 dollars, and the girl over the counter was trying to explain to him that bill without discounts was around 7.000 dollars. On a 385 minimum wage. It was 18 times the minimum wage. 

But what other choice you have?

You fall into debt, if you have the chance, or you end up in a waiting list that means you have to wait for years for a surgery or treatment that’s most often than not urgent. 

So there’s only two choices... you either pay for private health or you die in a waiting list, as it has happended too often.

And so... we protest, and we march, and we fight. Until we change this whole thing from the roots. 

New Constitution!

So! Finally, after a lot of hassle, Both Chilean’s chambers have voted and agreed to hold a plebiscite or referendum about wether we want or not a new constitution (ours is dated back to the 80′s and was made by a dictator that left everything writtten down so that nothing would ever be changed really and so my country has fallen into a state where companies own everything and the country doesn’t even own the water that runs through it)... aaaaaanyway. April is gonna be the big month. On April we vote if we need it or not.

But today, after 2 days voting and fighting for it, the first chamber has agreed to make it so that 50% of those who will write the new constitution HAVE to be women. 

Even if they get less votes that the other contestants in the area, there HAS to be a 50/50 gender parity.

AND I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER.

Now the senate has to vote on it again, but I think it’s clear now that the problem for the right wing was never the fact we wanted gender parity and independent to run with the same amount of power as people in political parties, but the fact that on that same vote was the vote for having protected spaces for native people.

And they wouldn’t want to have native people there to be able to judge them and take actual desitions for once.