Cuban Dreaming

[monk222]

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Rich Lowry takes on Michael Moore's trumpeting of Cuban healthcare and how it's not all it's cracked up to be:

Cuban health care works only for the select few: if you are a high-ranking member of the party or the military and have access to top-notch clinics; or a health-care tourist who can pay in foreign currency at a special facility catering to foreigners; or a documentarian who can be relied upon to produce a lickspittle film whitewashing the system.

Ordinary Cubans experience the wasteland of the real system. Even aspirin and Pepto-Bismol can be rare, and there's a black market for them. According to a report in the Canadian National Post: "Hospitals are falling apart, surgeons lack basic supplies and must reuse latex gloves. Patients must buy their sutures on the black market and provide bed sheets and food for extended hospital stays."

How could it be any different when Cuba embarked on a campaign of economic self-sabotage with the revolution of 1959? It went from third in per capita food consumption in Latin America to near the bottom, according to a State Department report. Per capita consumption of basic foodstuffs like cereals and meat actually has declined from the 1950s. There are fewer cars (true of no other country in the hemisphere), and development of electrical power has trailed every other Latin American country except Haiti.

... The only reason to fantasize about Cuban health care is to stick a finger in the eye of the Yanquis. For the likes of Michael Moore, the true glory of Cuba is less its health care than the fact that it is an enemy of the United States. That's why romanticizing Cuban medicine isn't just folly, but itself qualifies as a kind of sickness.

I can agree that extolling the virtues of totalitarian Cuba is philosophically and morally dubious. Yet, we do have serious problems with healthcare, and laissez faire is not the model to follow for this kind of good and services, as the market has to be supplemented with more than minimal regulation to ensure an outcome that we can live with.


(Source: Rich Lowery at RealClearPolitics.com)

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