What Michael Moore Didn’t Tell Us about Cuban Health Care
There are 73,000 physicians licensed to practice in Cuba. This allows Cuba to boast of having the best doctor-patient ratio in the world, with one doctor for every 170 people, as opposed to one for every 390 in the United States.
Yet reality belies the statistics. Slightly more than half of all Cuban physicians work overseas; taxed by the Cuban state at a 66% rate, many of them wind up defecting. Doctors who remain in the country earn about $25 a month. As a result…they often take “jobs as taxi drivers or in hotels,” where they can make better money…
Hospital patients must arrive with their own syringes, towels and bed sheets. Women avoid gynecological exams “because they fear infection from unhygienic equipment and practices.” Rates of cervical cancer have doubled in the past 25 years as the use of Pap tests has fallen by 30%.
Full Wall Street Journal article on the realities of Cuban health care here. Read the Foreign Affairs article, “Castrocare in Crisis,” by Laurie Garrett here.
It is possible to obtain relatively good health care in Cuba if you have enough money. But that the best doctors are mostly reserved for the elite willing to pay in dollars. Cuba exports doctors to under-developed countries around the world as a goodwill gesture. Yet, few people outside of Cuba travel there as medical tourists because the quality if far higher in other nearby countries – such as Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil.
To see the realities of Cuba’s health care (for both the poor & the elite), click on this link. Some very courageous Cubans have secretly photographed the conditions of Cuban hospitals & of the atrocities endured by the Cuban people to post for the world to see.
http://www.therealcuba.com/Page10.htm
As noted in many of your posts we are not in very good shape either. Just different problems. Now that Obamacare is staring us down we are at a crossroads. The truth of the problem and the ultimate correct solutions exist and must be illumniated, dispersed and acted upon.
The nation is at the threshold of a paradigm shift in American health care. The mammoth health care establishment will suddenly collapse because of the same fundamental phenomena that caused the recent failure of the U.S. housing industry and the current financial crisis, described as the worst since the great depression.
For decades the leading strategy for controlling skyrocketing costs was by controlling the supply of health care. Managed Care was a classic example of this misadventure. Not only did Managed Care fail, it backfired. Controlling cost by restricting supply is part of the old paradigm.
There is a proven, classic, and promising approach to effectively, permanently, and democratically control runaway costs.
The Right Moves Project.
The Right Moves Project brings the real story behind the chronic, 40-year failure and the imminent, sudden collapse of American health care. This real story comes from a private, proprietary, prolific 27-Year R&D Innovation Development Program that includes a comprehensive and valid blueprint to save the industry.
http://RightMovesProject.com
The answer is: Michael Moore knows nothing about Cuban health care.
Cuban health care is obviously killing people.
Doesn’t matter; the bill already passed, so Moore no longer needs to defend his earlier statements.
I can’t believe what you are saying about the Cuban Health system. I am at the moment in Cuba and it is obvious you are ignorant of the system here. I am not a Cuban but i can guarantee that there are more United States citizens seeking health care facilities here in Cuban than America. No one carries syringes, soap, sheets and towels etc. to the hospitals. it is true that there are private hospitals for foreigners but for peace sake the hospitals in Cuba treat their patients with so much care and love more than any and i stress on the any american hospitals. Answer this, if Cuba is sooooooooooo bad why are American Citizens here to study medicine. You wouldn’t believe the statistics.