Friday, March 26, 2010

Fidel Castro and Ted Strickland have now endorsed Obamacare. For Realz.

From the LA Times:
It perhaps was not the endorsement President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress were looking for.

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Thursday declared passage of American health care reform "a miracle" and a major victory for Obama's presidency, but couldn't help chide the United States for taking so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago.
And in case you were wondering what we have to look forward in mirroring the Cuban system...
Then there is the real Cuban system, the one that ordinary people must use — and it is wretched. Testimony and documentation on the subject are vast. Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce. In Sicko, even sophisticated medications are plentiful and cheap. In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market.

A nurse spoke to Isabel Vincent of Canada’s National Post. “We have nothing,” said the nurse. “I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date.”

The equipment that doctors have to work with is either antiquated or nonexistent. Doctors have been known to reuse latex gloves — there is no choice. When they travel to the island, on errands of mercy, American doctors make sure to take as much equipment and as many supplies as they can carry. One told the Associated Press, “The [Cuban] doctors are pretty well trained, but they have nothing to work with. It’s like operating with knives and spoons.”

And doctors are not necessarily privileged citizens in Cuba. A doctor in exile told the Miami Herald that, in 2003, he earned what most doctors did: 575 pesos a month, or about 25 dollars. He had to sell pork out of his home to get by. And the chief of medical services for the whole of the Cuban military had to rent out his car as a taxi on weekends. “Everyone tries to survive,” he explained. (Of course, you can call a Cuban with a car privileged, whatever he does with it.)

2 comments:

  1. Yet through all of those terrible conditions (and they are god awful), Cuba has a better infant mortality rate than the United States...how messed up is that?

    ReplyDelete
  2. "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Benjamin Disraeli

    "Why would we believe the Cuban government's health statistics?

    Cuba claims it has low infant mortality, but doctors tell us that Cuban obstetricians abort a fetus when they think there might be a problem. Dr. Julio Alfonso told us he used to do 70-80 abortions a day. And here's an even more devious way of distorting infant-mortality data: Some doctors tell us that if a baby dies within a few hours of birth, Cuban doctors don't count him or her as ever having lived.
    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/cuba_has_better_health_care_th.html

    "The mortality rate of Cuban children aged one to four years is 34 percent higher than the United States (11.8 versus 8.8 per 1,000). But these don't figure into United Nations (UN) and World Health Organization spotlighted ‘infant-mortality rates’ because those figures only follow death during the first year, allowing doctors to falsify figures to make death look like it happened after the first year. In addition, Cuba's infant mortality rate is also kept artificially low by an abortion rate of 0.71 abortions per live birth -- the hemisphere's highest by far, which ‘terminates’ any pregnancy that even hints at trouble."
    http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=14851

    You can't believe a leftist or leftist organization--EVER!

    ReplyDelete

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