REPORT: HEALTHCARE IN CUBA
GUARDIAN - According to the World Health Organization a Cuban man can expect to live to 75 and a woman to 79. The probability of a child dying aged under five is five per 1,000 live births. That is better than the US and on a par with the UK. Yet these world-class results are delivered by a shoestring annual per capita health expenditure of $260 - less than a 10th of Britain's $3,065 and a fraction of America's $6,543. There is no mystery about Cuba's core strategy: prevention. From promoting exercise, hygiene and regular check-ups, the system is geared towards averting illnesses and treating them before they become advanced and costly.
5 Comments:
"the system is geared towards averting illnesses and treating them before they become advanced and costly."
Yeah, but there's no profit in that. The U.S. healthcare system should be called the "profiting from illness" system.
There shouldn't be any profit in health care. That's the core of our problem in the US. To paraphrase an ugly sports cliche that I consider to be the root of American evil: profit isn't everything, it's the only thing.
When health care became only about profit, we stopped being healthy. When the network news divisions started being only about profit, we stopped getting anything like the whole picture. When business stopped being about progress and started being about maintaining maximum profit every day, the workers got screwed, the customers who use the shoddy products got screwed, and the environment started deteriorating at a catastrophic pace.
I think a good case can be made that anything integral to a dignified life should be provided on a non-profit basis. Not only healthcare, but food, shelter, edu, transportation, communication, ....
Why should anyone profit from common human needs?
The traditional answer, mairead, is that without the carrot of great riches and power dangling in front of them, no one would ever do anything.
We really went astray when our survival instincts, which were once linked to family and tribe as the source of food and shelter, became imprinted on money instead. (See various works by the late, great Robert Anton Wilson for more info, particularly his novel, Schrodinger's Cat, and his manual for the human brain, Prometheus Rising.)
FoE
The problem with all healthcare inflation starts when the patient is too far separated from the payment system. Nationalisation, employer-payed insurance, Medicare, Medicaid . . . all mean providers don't have to look most patients in the eyes and say, you're to poor to treat. When 'everybody' pays and 'nobody in particular' pays it's easy for all the middle men who sell drugs and equipment and hospital services and insurance and tests and scans to jack up the prices as high as they can. Add in corruption, embezzlement, and bribery and that's why every system costs more than it should.
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