![]() When he died there was a bill of more than $60,000” – more than 13 times Mexico’s average annual wage.Ĭovid-19 is now one of the five most expensive illnesses to treat in Mexico, alongside HIV and cancer, with an average treatment cost of $20,000 – although the price-tag can go beyond $1m in cases where patients go into intensive care or are put on ventilators. ![]() In less than a week they asked us for a deposit of $15,000 or they wouldn’t treat him. “My father was getting worse, and the bill was getting bigger. Then two days later they asked us for $5,000 more,” said Manuel, speaking by phone from Cuquío, the village where the family lives a two-hour drive from the hospital in the city of Zapopan. “We had to pay $2,500 before they’d even admit my father to hospital. What he didn’t realize was that the deductibles would jeopardise his entire family’s finances the moment he entered hospital in the western state of Jalisco. Pedro Martínez had paid health insurance for more than a decade and thought that would cover his treatment. Many believe even those numbers underplay the true scale of the catastrophe and that it actually has the second highest death toll after the US.įor many Mexican victims’ families, the devastating emotional toll has been accompanied by brutal economic price: the exorbitant cost of medical care for patients with the virus has left many in debt or bankrupt or forced to sell everything they have to cover treatment and hospital bills. On Thursday – with both Mexico’s president and its richest man fighting the illness – the country’s official death toll rose above that of India to more than 155,000, the third highest number on Earth. We sold everything we could: a plot of land, jewelry, my father’s truck – which we sold as junk for $300.”įew countries have suffered more from coronavirus than Mexico, where an average of nearly 1,300 daily deaths are being recorded during a punishing second wave of infections. ![]() “The moment came when we had to decide whether we had to mortgage the house or take out a loan. In Chile, it can refer to a hairpin or a romantic couple while in Spain, a stake or ante in gambling.“This illness broke us,” said his 54-year-old son Manuel. Pinche is often used to intensify cabrón, literally meaning “goat” but taken as “asshole.” Pinche cabrón shows up in young, urban English- and Spanish-language movies, TV, and music, such as the 2014 single “Collard Greens” by LA-based hip-hop artist Schoolboy Q and featuring Kendrick Lamar, who raps el pinche cabrón to call a man “the fucking idiot.”Įlsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, pinche can have very different, and much more innocuous, meanings. In parts of the US where Spanish is frequently spoken, such as Florida and Texas, pinche is also used as a rude term but can also mean “cheap” or “stingy.” In the Spanish spoken in Central America and especially Mexico, pinche‘s lowly connotations took on pejorative slang meanings ranging from “lousy” to “shitty.” Like many swear words, it can be a noun or an adjective depending on the context, but is roughly equivalent to the dismissive and intensive use of the English fucking (e.g., I hate that fucking movie). In Spanish, pinche literally means “ scullion,” or someone who works in a kitchen doing menial work like peeling potatoes or washing dishes.
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