One side effect of the release next week of Michael Moore's new film, "SiCKO," is the public may get to hear more about the Cuban health care system, and how "wonderful" and "free" it is.
Don't believe everything you hear or see on the screen.
Latin Business Chronicle reports:
In Sicko, the new movie by controversial writer-director Michael Moore, there is brief, 15-minute segment showing September 11 rescue workers getting treatment in Cuba. The movie, scheduled for a U.S. release next week, is aimed to be an exposé of the deficiencies of the U.S. healthcare system and the Cuba segment indicates that the Caribbean island has better healthcare than the United States.Latin Business Chronicle asked several Cuba experts for their opinion on how good the Cuban healthcare system is and how it compares with the U.S. healthcare system.
"After many years of increasing disrepair, the Cuban health system is now in crisis," says Jorge Salazar-Carrillo, a professor of economics at Florida International University and expert on Latin American economies.
In reality, Cuba has three types of health systems, argues Jaime Suchlicki, the director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami and a leading expert on Cuba. One for the Cuban military, members of the Communist Party and leaders of the government. A second one is for foreigners who pay in dollars or foreign currency and a third one for the general Cuban population.
"The first two are excellent, with modern equipment and availability of medications," he says. "The third, which is for the majority of the Cubans, is a veritable disaster with poor equipment and few medications and in many instances without the availability of Cuban specialists."
Salazar-Carrillo agrees. While Cuba has a high ratio of family doctors per inhabitant, the actual offer for ordinary Cubans is low. About half of the doctors are being exported to the poor countries of the world for hard currency (mainly Venezuela), while a similar portion is at the service of the Cuban Armed Forces and their families, he says. "Thus, at present the real availability to the populace is meager," says Salazar-Carrillo. "Cuba does not train the standard proportion of specialists."
However, Cuba does rank well in international surveys on mortality, maternal mortality, and life expectancy, points out Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. "Cuba ranks near the top on all these parameters in all of Latin America and I believe similar to the U.S. or just below," he says. "These are results obtained by addressing the basic public health issues of infectious disease control, basic nutrition and care for the high risk infants."
Nevertheless, even the official statistics are showing a worrisome trend. "For many years now, Cuba has been reported in the international health statistics as deficient in proteins and calories, even using the mendacious Cuban statistics," Salazar-Carrillo says.
This should not be surprising since milk is only distributed in Cuba to children under seven, those infirm, or over 65, he points out. "In the last decade and a half there have been several epidemics and the island is on the watch list of infectious disease specialists," Salazar-Carrillo says.
Read the rest here.
(Cross-posted at Babalú.)
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