Now, with Sicko, is time for him to idolized Castro and his regimen; again.
If he likes the health system and Castro so much, why he does not move to Cuba?
Not as an American enjoying the good sided of the Cuban apartheid; but as a regular Cuban worker —without a job in the tourism, not in the government or military and without family living abroad and sending him dollars.
Como diría mi mamá, "es muy fácil nadar fuera del agua"...
(it's very easy to swim when you are outside the water —or something like that)
He does not know about my sister in law's son, who died of a repairable heart disease, after an unsuccessful surgery, because the medical equipment need to test him was in the Cira García Clinic (the ones for those who paid in dollars for "the best health care in Latin America"). There was another one in the hospital used by Castro and his buddies; none of arrived on time —through personally asked favors— to the hospital were the boy was.
In theory, they have everything, including those equipments. And signing such a letter would be an automatic sentence for any cardiologist. None did it. And the boy died when he was five, in the so call health care paradise.
Moore and the thousands that think like him, don't not know that between 1990-1992, when Tíototo (my uncle) was battling kidney failure —as the result of a very long and consuming diabetes— some sort of shot he was supposed to received at every dialysis was being sent to Cuba by my half siblings and their mother; from Germany.
Neither they have been informed of the tuberculosis, dengue and all emerging epidemics my cousin, a doctor, have been seeing among her patients.
They don't know that she was demoted from her director position when she refused to take disciplinary actions against the OB doctors because around 10 newborns died at the hospital. Instead, she dared to say the it was not the doctor's fault, that the poor conditions in the OR and other problems in the hospital led to those babies death.
Have they heard that AIDS and HIV patients are confined in a few clinics in the outskirts of Havana? In Cuba, nobody has civil rights, but those patients are in a worst position.
They don't know that either.
Please, whoever hit the mouse and ended up in this blog, follow the advised posted at Babalú:
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.
Keep reading... there is more here.
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