Cuba is a poor country. So, their universal heal thcare reflects their own means. US is a rich country. We can do much better since we are already spending lots of money without good results.

Separately…
Here are some stats that may give us some good anchor points in the developing flamewar:

In 2008, life expectancy for a Cuban infant was 78.72 years. In the US life expectancy for an infant was 78.44 years.

Cuban infant mortality was 4.4 per 1000 births; American infant mortality was 6.8 per 1000 births.

Source: World Development Indicators, The World Bank. (Google it for yet another neat feature)

For the heck of it, I compared the above numbers with the CIA World Factbook. Factbook numbers for the US are basically in line, but numbers for Cuba give life expectancy as 77.64 years and infant mortality as 5.72 per 1000.

Cuba didn’t ban the movie. Rather they showed it on TV and had multiple screenings of the film print.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/viva-wikileaks

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, eh?

I live in Southern California and half the people that I know go to Mexico to get their health care.

…for the quality, to be absolutely sure.

So the Cuban government has an imperfect health care system and admits it, at least to themselves. And the US government has an imperfect lack of a health care system and largely lies about it…

Did I completely misunderstand the entire healthcare legislation debate? Hours upon hours of politicians of all sorts of political persuasions bloviating about what was wrong with the US healthcare? They disagreed on WHAT was wrong and on HOW to fix it (which is fine with me). But I don’t think you can claim the US is lying about healthcare or sweeping the issue under the carpet, especially given that it was the current administration’s number one priority, pursued at the expense of everything else. It’s all you saw on the news, for a long time. It would be like, a year from now, somebody claiming, “and Boing-Boing has been largely silent on the Wikileaks issue and its spokesperson.” :-)

Just some examples in Germany:
- Winter services have been outsourced to the private sector in some states. Where it has been done, taxpayers pay four times as much for the service now AND it is done much less reliable to the point we currently experience shortages in gas on gas stations as trucks can’t reach them to refuel anymore. Just as a sidenode: we do not have a particular hard winter this years. It’s merely average. If it was a winter like in 1946 or in the early 80s, I would not complain.
- The Deutsche Bahn has been sold and now those damn trains get stuck in the snow, heating not working very often, trains are late all the time and ICE is overheating during summer months as conditioning was not dimensioned strong enough. The S-Bahn (part or the Deutsche Bahn) is currently only providing 52-76% of the due services in Berlin. This is now the third winter in a row where S-Bahn is surprised to experience snow and ice …
- Since water sector has been sold, prices have more than quadrupled (in less then 10 years) and are still climbing fast each year.

Your claim has never been proven right but I can prove you wrong on countless examples here. Private sector is most of the time inefficient, lenient and unable to operate critical infrastructure. Just take a look at the number of giant black-outs you US-guys are experiencing each decade with some 100.000 people cut from electricity for days and weeks.

From a European perspective the US resemble to a third world country. Inefficient health care, regularly failing electric infrastructure, ridiculous edu-system and hardly any useful public transports. That’s what you get from cheering the private sector as much as you do.

…for the quality, to be absolutely sure.

I know a lot of people who go to Mexico to buy drugs, get dental work done and to have outpatient surgery. They do it because they either can’t afford any insurance coverage or because they can’t afford full coverage and it’s cheaper to have things done in Mexico than to receive health care in their own country. If we weren’t close to the border, they would be shit out of luck. They would get less care than the paint-peeling, don’t-have-the-drugs-that-you-need hospitals that Michael Moore didn’t show you on his VIP trip to Cuba.

I don’t think you can claim the US is lying about healthcare or sweeping the issue under the carpet

Squeeze any member of Congress and they’ll still claim that American Healthcare Is The Best Healthcare In The World.

I’d be willing to trade straight across, Cuban commies for California liberals, who seem to support the same old talking points even when the state is drowning in crime and debt and an education system that doesn’t work even though it spends plenty.

California is in financial distress because your right-wing comrades have capped property taxes at 1% for decades.

Maybe:

“Phony diplomacy: How the State Department lied about “Sicko” and Cuba

Squeeze any member of Congress and they’ll still claim that American Healthcare Is The Best Healthcare In The World.

I’ll give you that. But those representative and senators would be making meaningless statements. I imagine they’ll also say America is the best country in the world. And their home state is the best state within it. And they don’t have to be crazy or illogical to say so: there are many metrics to characterize state quality or healthcare system quality, and even smart, well-intentioned people disagree on these things, let alone people who are trying to game things to come out a certain way.

But really, Is there really a difference between “we’re the best but we need to improve” and “we’re not the best and we need to improve”? Does anyone care about distinctions like that?

thanks and have a nice day

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/viva-wikileaks

As for why U.S. medicine and procedures cost so much, I always chalked that up to a combination of patent enforcement, bad regulation, good regulation, and insane billing practices. It’s way too complicated to be explained away by simple platitudes.

The Wikileaks cables are not “truth”, rather, they are communications between US government officials, and need to be understood as such.

http://www.census.gov/govs/statetax/05staxrank.html

California is #10 in state taxes paid per capita. Other states get by on considerably less.