Despite an infusion of $500 million from the US, Iraq’s health care system is in shambles

Fixing it will go beyond money:

Across Iraq, many hospitals have neither computers nor meaningful patient files. Working X-ray machines and MRI scanners are few and far between.

At one of the busiest hospitals in Baghdad, five people die on average every day because medics and nurses don’t have the equipment to treat heart attacks and other commonplace ills and accidents, said Husam Abud, a doctor at al-Yarmouk Hospital. That equals more than 1,800 preventable deaths in a year in that hospital alone.

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