Ramon Raza, 31, was killed while walking near the hospital where he had been working as an electrician in Sotolongo. Authorities say they can never know if police were at fault but say the state, as an institution, “has lost the moral authority it possessed in order to protect the populace and its security and the integrity of the state.”

But even that might not be enough to prevent similar violence next time.

In fact that it happened at a hospital could hardly be more telling of Venezuela’s problem. Its hospitals are among the most heavily guarded in the world, not because they are unsafe but because there are few others that can provide similar services for hundreds of thousands.

“What happened Thursday in Sotolongo is not unique, but also not unique only in Venezuela,” said Robert Mugabe, then president of Zimbabwe.

The same could be said about Venezuela’s health system. Even if you include the five main public systems, the Venezuelan government still manages only 36 percent of what Venezuelans need. As a consequence, more than 4.1 million people are without access to clean, sterile water — a staggering 4 percent of the population — and 3.7 million of those have no running water.

Yet the government has long argued that it provided the bulk of services available in the country, despite its lack of capacity.

But as the country’s economic collapse continues, health services have come under more pressure than ever. A recent study published recently in the journal Health Affairs suggests that the Venezuelan economy, not the health system, is the source of the country’s dire health situation. The nation’s crisis worsened sharply amid the collapse of oil prices last year and intensified following Maduro’s socialist takeover of the country.

“The results of the two studies suggest that while the health situation is worsening across Latin America, there is a clear relationship between [country’s] economic situation and the health situation,” one of the lead researchers, Juan Carlos Rodriguez, deputy director of the Institute for Health and Sociology at the University of California-Irvine, told me by e-mail.

Those are the results of an online survey conducted by the organization Health Without Borders — who used Venezuela as a case study — from January until May.

Of the 27,350 people in question, almost two-thirds said that it was at least somewhat likely that they would experience a health emergency due to economic upheaval within the next two years