When going to a birth center resembles a Russian roulette, with no guarantees that the mother and child will be healthy & cared for, you know that a health care system has failed. Unfortunately, this is the case with Romania's rotten universal health care system. A warning to all those universal-health-care-gurus in the United States. There is no glamor to a corrupt, mismanaged, state-run system. And no reliable, equitable treatment either.
According to the UNICEF data, Romania has the highest child mortality rate in the developed world: 19 deaths per every 1000 newborn children. The chart shows many former Communist countries ranking close – such as Albania (18/1000), Russia (17/1000) or Serbia (15/1000). But some formerly Communist countries like Slovenia or the Czech Republic have fewer infant deaths even than the US (7/1000). Another grim statistic where Romania holds the leading position is the one regarding mothers who die at birth.
Beyond the statistics, a recent case shocked the Romanian public: 40-year-old Natalia Ionescu died on October 11 in a prestigious birth center in Romania’s capital Bucharest, after delivering a boy in a C-section. Her husband, journalist Mihai Ionescu, claims she was not given any transfusion after 12 hours of massive blood loss.
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Dec 18th, 2007
(41 years old) about what Radio Free Europe meant for the listeners in the Communist block, especially Romanians. It was the only trustworthy medium in a sea of Communist propaganda. It was also highly risky to listen to it. The Secret Police (Securitate) and the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu himself considered this radio station as the main enemy in the decreasing popularity of his regime. The Securitate had about 800 people hired to follow the RFE journalists abroad and their listeners in Romania. They constantly tried to silence the RFE voices. Starting with hostile propaganda on the lines of "Radio Free Europe is a CIA propaganda machine" (despite the fact that since the late 60s the CIA was not funding it anymore) and culminating with terrorist attack carried out by 
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