Posted on 11/30/2016 8:26:54 PM PST by SeekAndFind
On public-access TV in 1985, Bernie Sanders defended an element of Fidel Castro’s regime: It was rarely mentioned that Castro provided health care to his country. Sanders grumbled that the same could not be said of then-President Reagan.
The comment came back to haunt Sanders in the wake of Castro’s death. On Sunday on ABC’s This Week, host Martha Raddatz played the old clip and then asked Sanders if he was aware that “this was a brutal dictatorship despite the romanticized version that some Americans have of Cuba.” She reminded Sanders that Castro rationed food and punished dissidents, then hit him with the big question: “So have you changed your view of Castro since 1985?”
Sanders said he didn’t exactly remember the context for his comment (being 31 years ago) but that Cubans “do have a decent health-care system.”
Many consider it more than decent. After a visit to Havana in 2014, the director-general of the World Health Organization Margaret Chan called for other countries to follow Cuba’s example in health care. Years before, the World Health Organization’s ranking of countries with “the fairest mechanism for health-system finance” put Cuba first among Latin American and Caribbean countries (and far ahead of the United States).
Cuba has long had a nearly identical life expectancy to the United States, despite widespread poverty. The humanitarian-physician Paul Farmer notes in his book Pathologies of Power that there’s a saying in Cuba: “We live like poor people, but we die like rich people.” Farmer also notes that the rate of infant mortality in Cuba has been lower than in the Boston neighborhood of his own prestigious hospital, Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s.
All of this despite Cuba spending just $813 per person annually on health care compared with America’s $9,403.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
That’s beyond disgusting. Guess my friend/ex supervisor was right. I’m sure the msm has printed this picture a thousand times /s
My supervisor was gay and me being a caveman, we knocked heads a couple of times (wrong phrase!!).
But he voted conservative regardless of the gay issue because he realized how small it was compared to having communism.
Anyone who believes statistics coming from a communist country is an idiot.
Eating too much kills 10 times more people than those who eat less. So it is not surprising Cubans live as long as Americans. In reality they should live longer.
Both my grandfathers in India lived past 95. My mother lived to age 103. All of them ate way less food than we eat in America, and their medical services were primitive as well, compared to modern day American standards.
The same way we believe thechocalate ration has been increased to 25 grams from 30 grams.
Go to youtube and search Cuban hospital if you want to see the actual state of Cuban healthcare from dissident videos. It isn’t even up to safe, let alone “good”!!!
We eat too many foods rich in fat & protein compared to Cubans. And we walk much less than an average Cuban. Yet we manage to live as long as the Cubans with our superior medical & health facilities.
I can get:
Ketchup on fries.
Ice Cold Beer
Ice in my soft drink
57 channels.
Porn, poetry and go to rock concerts
Drunk, High or Successful
Whatever....
Since the states have never delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution the specific power to regulate, tax and spend for INTRAstate healthcare purposes, the states are hereby challenged as follows.
Ultimately depending on what a given state’s legal majority voters want, the states are challenged to come up with a better healthcare program than Cuba's that costs less than $813 per person.
The states will be able to finance their individual healthcare programs after they work with Trump to put a stop to unconstitutional federal taxes, taxes that Congress cannot justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
Communists want us back in caves w/o fire (regulated).
DWB wouldn’t exist if it not for these regimes. Let that sink in.
In utter misery.
Theres a ton of US based Cubans that live long as well as a ton of long lived Japanese. They don’t all have Castrocare.
A calorie restricted diet does increase lifespan...
Like to see their stats broken out demographically, like ruling class versus peasants. They probably also don’t count executions within the sample cohort...
The average Cuban makes about $20 a month. If what is said is even true, they live longer because they can’t afford to drink or smoke or eat fatty foods.
And I bet that average of $813 per person is a way to disguise the Second-World level of care the Ruling Class gets vs. the North Korean type of care the peasants receive.
Pretty freaking poorly.
What do I win?
I remember a major US news organization touring a Cuban hospital back in the 90s and the place was a filthy hovel. No thanks.
If you actually have a life threatening illness Cuba is not the place to be
Also this type of reporting is as favtual as the claim that Cuba has a hundred percent literacy rate. It is self reported and meaningless.
The Dem's / MSM's major claims were:
For a debunking of the first, see Ann Coulter's well-researched piece: MORE LIBERAL LIES ABOUT NATIONAL HEALTH CARE!
For the second claim, the critical thing to know is that the formula for calculating the Rankings are determined by the WHO (World Health Org), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the UN.
You've all heard of the UN, I assume? The same outfit that does rankings of human rights country-by-country, that conclude the USA is in the neighborhood of Cuba and N Korea? Yup, that's right - that UN.
Back in 2009, I looked into how the WHO does the rankings. The single biggest factor they used to decide whether a nation's Health Care Ranking is up in the stratosphere or down in Hell is simply: whether or not they have Nationalized Health Care. If your nation does NOT have its Health Care totally controlled by a powerful national government, then by definition your nation's HC sucks bigtime, no matter WHAT the other stats say.
Another major factor they used was the Infant Mortality Rate. Duh. See Ann's debunking above.
I don't remember what I found out about the human longevity stats, but I will say this: From what I learned about the reporting of each nation's Infant Mortality stats, especially that each country decides themselves what their stats are, and are free to wildly fudge these stats so as to make nation-by-nation comparisons mostly meaningless, leads me to wonder if Cuba's longevity figures are whatever Fidel & Raul say they are going to be in any given year, and the WHO swallows whole anything Cuba reports. Of course I can't prove that, but where there's smoke there's usually fire; and there's plenty of smoke here.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.