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Politics : A US National Health Care System?

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From: TimF	9/21/2007 6:45:10 PM
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Cuban health statistics Submitted by Constant on Wed, 2007-09-19 06:51. Every so often, an enemy of liberty will point out that Cuba has fantastic health care, in fact it's overflowing with health care, it has so much great health care that it sends doctors to other countries to give them something to do because everybody is just so darned healthy in Cuba. I don't know if it really amounts to anything but I did run across this paper (pdf) which critically examines the assumption that the Cuban health statistics are reliable. The author points out that ideocratic states often use very authoritarian tactics--tactics that individual doctors and patients can subjectively experience very negatively--to create and maintain favorable health statistics. When issues of state power and social control are factored into the analysis, it becomes possible to see how Cuba’s health indicators are at least in some cases obtained by imposing significant costs on the Cuban population--costs that Cuban citizens are powerless to articulate or protest, and foreign researchers unable to empirically investigate. The author highlights a telling anecdote that illustrates the atmosphere of intimidation and secrecy in Cuba: One family doctor told me that she once led an instructional seminar for medical students at the University of Havana. During the seminar they reviewed several problematic cases, one of which involved a patient who had died due to mistakes made by a doctor. The case was included as a warning to the students to be careful in following established treatment protocols and surgical procedures. After the seminar, one of the medical students approached the doctor and told her that after reading the case file, she realized that the patient in the case study was actually a close relative of hers. She said that the doctors who treated him told her family he had died of natural causes, and she was very traumatized to find he had actually died from malpractice. The doctor running the seminar sympathized with the student’s grief and anger, but told her it would be better if she kept quiet and made no complaint against the hospital. To do so would be to risk being labeled a political dissident or a counterrevolutionary. The student reluctantly concurred. distributedrepublic.net also see the comments

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