Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital Abada-Barrero Csar Ernesto

In Health in Ruins Csar E. Using team-based and collaborative ethnography to analyze the social life of neoliberal health policy, Abada-Barrero details the everyday dynamics around teaching, learning, and working in health care before, during, and after privatization. Abada-Barrero chronicles the story of El Materno--Colombia's oldest maternity and neonatal health center and teaching hospital--over several decades as it faced constant threats of government shutdown.

Despite radical cuts in funding and a corrupt and malfunctioning privatized system, El Materno's professors, staff, and students continued to find ways to provide innovative, high-quality, and He argues that health care privatization not only is about defunding public hospitals; it also ruins rich traditions of medical care by denying or destroying ways of practicing medicine that challenge western medicine.