Cuban Health Care

Sorry again for the hiatus. This summer turns out to have been a really bad time to start a blog, since I was away for long periods of time, and now that I'm back, I'm buried in the debris of fall kickoff stuff.

I'll try to soldier on, though.

I've been enjoying NPR's series on health care in other nations. Today's segment was on Spain's system, and it jogged my memory on the health care system of one of our neighbors: Cuba.

About ten years ago I traveled to Cuba with a group from my college (back before Bush made it more difficult to do). We were basically an educational and humanitarian trip, connected to some Baptist communities there, which are surprisingly numerous. We took a LOT of medical supplies with us, since the embargo makes getting even simple things like Tylenol very problematic.

The entire trip was eye-opening, for sure. Cuba is a beautiful nation full of beautiful and engaging people, and not at all like the enclave of evil our national rhetoric leads to believe it is. We began our trip in Havana, one of the coolest cities I've ever been to, and then traveled down the northern coast to Matanzas, Yaguahay, and eventually to a village called Piedrecitas. We stayed there for a few days, before making our way back to Havana for the flight back home.

Along the way, one of our major focal points was health care. We toured several medical facilities, and spoke to several doctors and patients about it. You might think that decades of the embargo would have crippled the Cuban health care system, but that's really not true. It's true that there is a perpetual shortage of equipment and medicine, but the care itself is really quite excellent. Cuban doctors are in demand all over the world, and many Europeans (who are not bound by the embargo) travel to Cuba for medical procedures.

As a communist nation, of course, Cuba provides health care to all of its citizens. I don't want to romanticize this, as Cuba clearly has a sketchy human rights record, and money can certainly buy you access to great care there. But the philosophy, and usually the practice, is that everybody gets care. Did you know that the Cuban infant mortality rate is better than that in the United States? Or that the life expectancy is roughly identical to that in the US? This without access to the cutting-edge technology that we employ so routinely in the US.

I'm not sure I would advocate for a system like Cuba's in the US (although my excellent experiences with Kaiser Permanente's HMO dispose me to admire managed-care systems), I think we could learn a lot about how frugality and excellent care can go together from our southern neighbors.

And while we're on the subject, I want to know where I can sign my name to this.