general health care) in Latin America, and second only to Canada in the western hemisphere.
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Cuba's infant mortality rate is lowest in Latin America
4 January 2007
Havana.– In 2006, Cuba had the lowest infant mortality rate in its history and of all Latin America, putting it in second place behind Canada for the Americas as a whole, according to a health ministry report.
Cuba's infant mortality rate was 5.3 deaths per 1,000 births in 2006, compared to 5.8 per 1,000 in 2005, making it "the leader in Latin America" in the category, said the report quoted in the official newspaper Granma.http://www.dominicantoday.com/dr/this-and-that/2007/1/4/21172/Cubasinfant-mortality-rate-is-lowest-in-Latin-America-----
Cuba Reduces Infant Mortality Rate to 5.3
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Havana, Jan 5 (Prensa Latina) Cuba concluded 2007 with an infant mortality rate of 5.3 per 1,000 live births, a number which leads all of Latin America, the Caribbean and is considerably below the US rate of 6.0.http://cubajournal.blogspot.com/2008/01/cuba-reduces-infant-mortality-rate-to.html-----
Health Care? Ask Cuba
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 12, 2005
Here's a wrenching fact: If the U.S. had an infant mortality rate as good as Cuba's, we would save an additional 2,212 American babies a year.
Yes, Cuba's. Babies are less likely to survive in America, with a health care system that we think is the best in the world, than in impoverished and autocratic Cuba. According to the latest C.I.A. World Factbook, Cuba is one of 41 countries that have better infant mortality rates than the U.S.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/opinion/12kris.html----------------------------
I notice that recent reports in the Corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies tend to leave Cuba out of the story. (The NYT column, above, that I found in a Google search, is 2005.) The truth is that, as to health care, socialism is best, communism is next best and predatory capitalism means poor health care for most people, with many unable to afford health care at all, and with the U.S. tumbling down the charts to rank with the most predatory capitalist, fascist and most poorly run governments in the world. Reaganism and Bushwhackism have done this to us. We used to rank way up there with only the most developed socialist countries (the Scandinavians) ahead of us.
Irony: The Cuban revolution overthrew what was arguably the worst "banana republic" on earth--the Batista regime (whose adherents fled to Miami and became Republicans), and Castro's Cuba (an attempt to right the wrongs of the Batista regime) became the most hated and reviled government on earth, by U.S. politicians and Corpo/fascists, despite Cuba's obvious advances in human welfare. Cuba has such a good health care system that it now exports doctors to other countries, for instance, to staff new medical clinics for the poor in some of the many South American countries that have elected leftist governments over the last decade (and whose rightwing governments had utterly neglected health care for the poor, including neglecting medical education for doctors and other health care professionals, and other basics of a decent society, such as street lighting, flood control and low cost housing in poor areas).
Cuba has universal health care, with a stress on preventive medicine, and FREE medical education for all qualified students. To me that latter is very important. A doctor's first motivation should be compassion, and if you saddle young doctors with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt coming out of medical school, your health care system is going to fail for most people. They may have been motivated by compassion in the first year of their educations; by the end of their educations, this humongous debt is their overriding reality. Do the math. General practitioners--family doctors--fall out of the system. Young doctors can't afford to work in health clinics for the poor. All doctors are tempted to do deals with Big Pharma and other money-making propositions, and to develop high end medical practices that serve the wealthiest people. Their first priority has to be servicing a huge debt. Whatever their good instincts may have been, they are almost all forced to put money first--and this ultimately corrodes and degrades the health care system, with the poor suffering the most (little or no health care) and the middle class increasingly falling into crippling debt due to skyrocketing medical costs, and greedy blood-sucking "middle men"--the insurance companies and credit card usurers.
Cuba goes to the other extreme--all doctors making only modest salaries (in a system with many social supports commonly shared), and no "middle men"--but the "other extreme" illustrates what medicine has traditionally been all about: compassion. Not yachts and second mansions. The medical profession is founded on an ancient Greek oath to put the patient first. Predatory capitalism fundamentally assaults that oath. The Cuban system fosters it. And the socialized medicine of Scandinavia and Europe falls somewhere in between.
It's disgustingly ironical that the insurance and other Corpo lobbies tout the myth of a "personal physician" to stop all political impetus toward socialized medicine here, while THEY are the intervenors between patient and doctor. THEY are the ghouls who profit from illness--by selectively cutting out the sickest people, and those most in need of health care, from coverage, and profiteering against all with increasing premiums, drug price gouging and all they other abuses we've seen.
In Cuba, the state provides health care to everyone, and is in fact NOT a "middle man" because everyone is entitled to care. The burden of human illness is shared, and spread out, so that it does not fall on the most vulnerable--the people who are ill.
Although all the new leftist governments of South American are NOT following the Cuban economic model--they have mixed socialist/capitalist economies (more like Europe)--and strong democracies, in which people can still own property and become rich if they play by the rules (pay their taxes, obey the laws)--they are influenced by Cuba's health care system, and the best of them are opting for universal health care. And, at some point, they, too, are going to suprass the U.S. in health care statistics and other measures of a good society--while we, well, it's hard to say where we are headed, but it's looks, at the present moment, like we are headed toward becoming the biggest "banana republic" on earth.