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health care systems in the world, with the lowest infant mortality rate (a key indicator) in the western hemisphere. There is NO REASON--if reason were to be applied--that we couldn't adopt many or all features of Cuba's health care system, without becoming "godless communists." That is, if our country were run by mature adults. But reason ain't in it. On Cuba policy (and, indeed, all Latin American policy) our leaders are either petulant children or insane. It is so ironic that people whom the rightwing call "godless" take the Christian view of health care: that it is NOT a money-making opportunity; it is and act of mercy. They, first of all, provide FREE medical educations to all qualified students. That alone would transform our medical system, since one of the drivers of medical costs is the horrendous debt that most young doctors find themselves in at the beginning of their careers. Another driver is the limited number of qualified people permitted into medical schools--a deliberate cap on those highly prized, vital skills.
Cuba now EXPORTS doctors, for instance, to Venezuela, in exchange for cheap oil. This allows Venezuela--whose rightwing oil elite utterly neglected their country's health care and educational systems--to jumpstart medical care for the poor with new medical clinics in all the poverty-stricken areas never before served by government, while Venezuelan (and other foreign) students get their FREE medical educations in CUBA. Cuban doctors are also helping the poor in Bolivia, Ecuador and other countries. And Cuba provides FREE eye operations for the blind, and works with other countries to fly the poor blind to Cuba for eyesight restoration. Cuba exports mercy. The U.S. exports armaments and other military booty, big agriculture's produce dumped at cheap prices on third world markets to destroy their local food producers, and bad 'christian' nutball ideas (for instance, closing third world women's health clinics if they even mention abortion as an option to dirt poor pregnant women on their seventh pregnancy or the rape victims in a war zone).
We may not approve of Cuba's political system. And Cuba may not approve of ours. We, after all, hold elections that are far less transparent than any election system since Stalinist Russia.* That is no reason to deny, and refuse to learn from, something that Cuba does well--universal health care.
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*It was Josef Stalin who is believed to have said, ""Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." In the U.S.A., three rightwing Bushite corporations now 'count' all our votes, using 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code in all the shiny new electronic voting systems, with virtually no audit/recount controls. Many states in the U.S. (40% to 50%) have absolutely no way to verify the vote. They don't provide a paper ballot backup--there is nothing to recount or audit. And even the best states do only a 1% audit of the electronic totals--miserably inadequate in a 'TRADE SECRET' code system.
By contrast, Venezuela has electronic voting, but it is an OPEN SOURCE code system--no 'trade secrets'; anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they handcount a whopping 55% of the votes, as a check on machine fraud. Is it any wonder, then, that Venezuelans are able to elect a government with a sane, mature, mutually beneficial attitude towards Cuba, among other beneficial policies, while we got "four more years" of the insane, immature, destructive, criminal, fascist horrors of Bush-Cheney. They stole 2000 by buying the Supreme Court; by 2004, however, 80% of the country's votes were 'counted' by their buds at Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, who also (s)elected this Democratic Congress in '06, which now has a single digit approval rating. (The fascist coup in our voting system occurred between 2002 and 2004, with the fast-tracking of these election theft machines all over the country.) Is Cuba's system any worse than this? It is flawed, certainly. But, frankly, ours is fatally flawed--as the dead of Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans could tell us, if the dead could speak.
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