I’m a progressive. A huge one.
Lack of insurance coverage is a big problem, but human rights should be pre-eminent in any discussion of health care. Cuban healthcare is a verifiable sham, available only to those who pay. It only requires intellectual honesty to acknowledge this. There’s no factual debate possible – the facts are dead bodies, starving people, and substandard healthcare for the majority of real Cubans. The human rights violations in Cuba are numerous and as well-documented as can be under any totalitarian, anti-rights, Orwellian state. The fact that any self-respecting progressive would look to a rights-repressive dictatorship for guidance on healthcare is sickening to this card carrying bleeder.
Progressives do not stand with or for Cuba. Period. A two-class health care system is not a solution to the U.S. problem with healthcare.
As for Canada, while a collectivist system may be implemented for a nation that struggles with emigration and supports a thinly spread population totalling less than the single state of California, the fact of it is that it really won’t function in the U.S.
I agree that there is a built in problem in the U.S., but that problem resides in the way we pay for health insurance, not in the access.
I believe health care payment (because that is what this is really about) CAN be improved, and I’m glad that J.B. brought the topic up. But obesity is the problem of a rich nation and excess, not a lack of health care access. We all know we should eat less and exercise more – but the fact that we’ve got more disposable income in the U.S. than other countries (and, incidentally, smoke less) is a greater threat to national obesity. The solution to that is to encourage more appetite-curbing smoking nationwide, and to limit incomes.
At one level, universal healthcare is a solution in search of a problem.
Let’s more clearly define the problem.
