Also, Carlos III hospital was mothballed and semidismantled in the ruling party's latest bout of healthcare privatization,
...
Privatizing healthcare? Why did they do that? Did they want to copy the USA healthcare system?
... If you ask me, they want to provide new income sources to their friends. Their original plan involved dismantling several public hospitals (repurposing them as... other stuff, in general. For instance, they wanted to repurpose the Hospital La Princesa as a psycogeriatric internment center) and give the management of several others to private corporations (it's the worst of both worlds: The hospital and it's resources are paid by taxpayers, but there's an extra private middleman that is getting a cut).
The idea is that the private middleman gets an assignment of cash, and the hospital expenses come out of that, and is "supposed" to make the whole thing run more smoothly in order to get a bigger cut for itself out of that cash.
In practice it works badly. Those centers tend to try to game the system by referring more severe (expensive) patients to NHS-run hospitals (this is not exclusive of private hospitals. Internment centers and hospices do it as well). Likewise they also tend to cut down the treatments they do offer. And despite all that their final statistics have shown that they're more expensive than the NHS-run centers. IMO it's all a scam on the taxpayers.
Then again, after seeing what has happened at my (public, NHS) run hospital, which has been all but crippled by several horrid management decisions. I think the NHS should remain public, and in goverment hands, but it's management structure must be rethinked throughly. As it is we're too vulnerable to political changes, which may lead to unqualified (disqualified?) people getting a lot of power (such as in my hospital), or political assholes simply gifting the whole pie to their cronies (as it happened in Madrid).
But this is all off-topic...
If anyone is curious, I could drone (elsewhere) on what the assholes in power did in my hospital in general, and my department in particular. It'd probably fit better in the rage thread, or somesuch
It could be that they don't have enough money to pay for it any more, at least without drowning in debt.
Yet somehow we did have cash to burn in a stupid Madrid 2020 Olympics campaign (which busted, goes without saying), and several other expensive crazy projects all over the country (including, but not limited to, a major train station in the middle of the desert, and an airport with
0 air traffic). Funny, huh?