The impact of Venezuela’s economic collapse on its people is almost impossible to put into words. But these images inside calamity-hit hospitals go some way to communicating the devastation. Since oil prices plummeted, all aspects of everyday life – electricity, food, paper – have been rationed. Critically, medical centers are in crisis. Without soap, antibiotics, power, gloves and x-rays, surgeons are struggling to keep patients alive.

Photographs taken by New York Times photographer Meridith Kohut offer a glimpse inside some of the most notorious centers – while President Nicolas Maduro claims the socialist nation as the best healthcare in the world. The Luis Razetti Hospital (pictured) in the portal city of Barcelona looks like a war zone. Patients can be seen balancing themselves on half-broken beds with days-old blood dried up on their bodies. They’re the lucky ones; most are curled up on the floor, blood streaming, limbs blackening. Children lie among dirty cardboard boxes in the hallways without food, water or medication.

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NOTE: Societies would have much much more than they could ever imagine, if they reverted back to smaller government and a wide open free market economy. Any resulting ”injustice” would pale in comparison to what the government statist has done to society.