February 21, 2007
Trading freedom for "health"
I'm glad Val posted about his experience at the hospital yesterday. It's a good reminder of what our health system is and what it isn't.
castro's propagandists make a big "to do" about Cuba's great health care system and how Cuba's life expectancy approaches that of the US. This despite the fact that they are supposed to have a superior system to our dreadful one.
But as Val pointed out, in the U.S. there are lot of opportunities for health care, unfortunately not everyone takes advantage of them. For example, the very poor are covered with Medicaid and the elderly are covered with Medicare. A lot of us are insured through private insurance or through our employer. But even if you fall through the cracks, and don't qualify for any of that, you can still go to an emergency room and, if it is an emergency, they can't turn you away. Sure you may be on the hook for a lot of money, but it's only money.
In Cuba on the other hand there is no way to opt out of the system. You are at the mercy of the bureaucracy. And let me ask this question. What happens in Cuba when a doctor commits a malpractice? What recourse does the patient have? Now, as the son of doctor I can tell you that attorneys aren't my favorite people but at least in the U.S. you have a choice of which doctor to go to, and if that doctor makes a mistake you have access to some sort of remedy.
But there's an underlying theme in all of the discourse of the leftist apologists for fidel castro. And it's that, regardless of the abuses the regime has engaged in that on the whole it's a good government because it has provided universal healthcare for its people. There's a lot of problems with this, of course. First of all who gets to decide what health care is worth? Who determines exactly how much of my freedom I have to exchange for some health security?
We been having this debate in the US continuously since 9/11. How much of our civil liberties should we give up in exchange for security? It's reasonable debate to have, and one we have in the electronic media, in print, on the web, in the legislature, and in the courts every day. It's essentially the same debate about the Cuban health care system. Except that in Cuba you can't debate it at all. There was never a referendum in Cuba about signing away civil liberties in exhange for health care. The same civil liberties that liberal groups believe are being violated in the U.S. were completely discarded 48 years ago in Cuba in the name of goal whose outcome is highly debatable.
There's a reason that the founders of this great country said that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Inalienable, for those who might be wondering, means "incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred."
How smart were these men that lived 230 years ago? They knew that there would be snake oil salesmen out there that would try to get us to trade some liberty here and trade some liberty there in exchange for various things that in the end aren't as important as liberty. So they emphasized in the document that created this country the idea that these rights are non-negotiable.
Which brings me to another thing that really, really bothers me: people who make this argument about trading liberty for social services in Cuba when they aren't willing to do so themselves. Val rightly calls these people vicarious Marxists.
I call them racists. I mean what else would lie behind the idea that a system that "isn't good enough for me" is "good enough for Cubans" or Venezuelans or Bolivians? As if "those people" have alienable rights, rights that can be surrendered or transferred. I think these people view Cubans like animals at the zoo. They want to go and watch them in their cages and so they assuage their guilt by saying "they are well fed and taken care of." This despite the overwhelming evidence that they are not.
Posted by Henry Louis Gomez at February 21, 2007 01:36 PM
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Comments
Good post. And I agree with most of your points 100%. The only thing I don't agree with is this:
"We been having this debate in the US continuously since 9/11. How much of our civil liberties should we give up in exchange for security? It's reasonable debate to have, and one we have in the electronic media, in print, on web, in the legislature, and in the courts every day."
As you pointed out earlier:
"There's a reason that the founders of this great country said that all men are 'are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'
Inalienable, for those who might be wondering, means 'incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred.'"
So the acceptable amount of civil liberties to give up in the name of safety is NONE.
Or as Benjamen Franklin once said: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Posted by: Mike.Hunter ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.babalublog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 21, 2007 03:56 PM
Hey we agree on something.
The thing is that when the president does something in this country that is perceived as a restriction on civil liberties it is challenged. And often successfully so. We have the mechanisms in place to prevent the usurpation of such liberties. Now we can debate where the those liberties begin. For example if I am monitoring a suspected terrorist overseas, and he calls you is it within your civil liberties to expect privacy. If you are not guilty of conspiring then your call will not even be a note a government report. An abuse or abridgement of your civil liberties might be if I took information that was non-criminal and used it against you. The kind of thing the FBI did routinely under J. Edgar Hoover.
The fact that nobody that I'm aware of is alleging that info unrelated to terrorism was captured and used against them.
We can disagree about what constitutes an infringement of civil liberties. You can have your day in court. The court can even rule that the president has to stop doing what he's doing.
None of this happens in Cuba. There is no recourse or mechanism in place to stop a run-away government.
Posted by: Henry "Conductor" Gomez at February 21, 2007 04:39 PM
Today I found this little note at the end of Wikipedia section http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba on Public Heath (in Cuba):
In depth examination of WHO statistics for Cuba reveals that these statistics are prepared by the each government [21] and published unchanged by WHO; thus they have been called into question.[22]
Posted by: Larry Daley at February 21, 2007 08:28 PM
Excellent words Henry, I loved mainly the last paragraph:
"I call them racists. I mean what else would lie behind the idea that a system that "isn't good enough for me" is "good enough for Cubans" or Venezuelans or Bolivians? As if "those people" have alienable rights, rights that can be surrendered or transferred. I think these people view Cubans like animals at the zoo. They want to go and watch them in their cages and so they assuage their guilt by saying "they are well fed and taken care of." This despite the overwhelming evidence that they are not."
It reminds me of the lefties Europeans I have met, they can say how horrible was Pinochet but they look surprised when you tell them than Castro has been worse.
Posted by: K-2 at February 22, 2007 07:58 AM
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