Patients in Colombia wait hours in lines outside pharmacies, routine operations are postponed and medicine shelves are emptied. Basic medicines, insulin and cancer medicines are missing, critically ill patients are being turned away from hospitals. Maternity and neonatal wards are closing, emergency departments are overburdened and training for doctors is being cancelled. Colombia's health care system has been hailed as a model for Latin America in the past two decades by the World Health Organization and the World Bank. Andrés Vecino of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said these problems were entirely avoidable and millions of lives are at risk.