Tuesday, January 16, 2007

About that Great Healthcare System in Cuba...

When I'm verbally duking it out with liberals, they frequently bring up Cuba's free education and healthcare systems. This is usually brought up to show how terrible the American education system is and what evil, greedy people we are not to have national healthcare.

I know a little about national healthcare systems, having relatives overseas and hearing their horror stories of long waits and rejections for treatment (my grandfather was told he had "lived long enough" when he was diagnosed with cancer at 72). I always find it curious that those shrieking loudest about "choice" don't usually bring up the fact that nationalized healthcare necessitates limitations in treatment.

I haven't heard any gushing lately about that wonderful Cuban healthcare system, but maybe that's because doctors there botched Fidel Castro's treatment.

Hot Air quotes this Reuters article which says:

Cuban leader Fidel Castro has long prided himself on Cuba's doctors and free public health care system, but that system seems to have let him down after he fell ill in July , U.S.-based doctors said on Tuesday.

Based on a report in Tuesday's edition of Spain's El Pais newspaper, the doctors -- who have no first-hand knowledge of Castro's condition -- said Castro had received questionable or even botched care at the hands of health experts on his communist-ruled island.

"It's not a good story. Too bad they didn't send him to Miami for surgery," said Dr. Charles Gerson, a clinical professor of medicine in the gastroenterology division of New York's Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.

Indeed.