PrintOne more thing for Bernie on Cuba's glorious free health care: It killed Hugo Chávez
Bernie Sanders got himself into hot water with Florida's voters by praising Cuba's "literacy programs," which were ugly coercive propaganda efforts for those who experienced them.
It's far from the only thing he's praised about the Castroite communist hellhole. According to the New York Times:
MIAMI — In the spring of 1989, as the outgoing mayor of Burlington, Vt., Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane, traveled to Cuba on an eight-day trip, with the hopes of meeting the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro.
The 47-year-old Mr. Sanders didn't get time with Mr. Castro, but he toured Havana, met with its mayor and marveled that visitors could take a cab anywhere in the country. "The revolution there is far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be," he said back home, according to The Burlington Free Press, and commended Cuba for providing free health care, free education and free housing.
Free health care? That one's worth a teaching moment for Bernie, too.
Not only do citizens get experiences like this, but it's worth noting that even Fidel Castro himself knew better than to use it. Socialist systems may create two-tier health care systems for the ordinary people and the elites, which is bad enough, but in the absence of any innovation and the only incentives to "excellence" being political ones, even the elites' system eventually goes to hell, too, at least on life-or-death matters.
Castro knew this, which is why he decided to import his doctor from Spain to treat his malignant diverticulitis.
His little pawn, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, wasn't quite as savvy. He actually believed the lies about Cuba's free health care system — and with some sort of internal cancer, paid for his faith in Castrocare with his life.
Shortly before Chávez's 2013 death in a Cuban hospital, the truth came out about the disastrous state of Cuban health care — even for the elites — back when I was writing editorials at Investor's Business Daily:
Americas: Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is dying of cancer in Havana, in a live demonstration of Cuba's vaunted socialized medical care. He went there instead of Brazil because he wanted to make a political statement. What irony.
...and...
Most galling for him: It didn't have to happen this way.
His expected demise will be entirely due to his gullibility to leftist propaganda and bad choices that came of it.
"In July 2011, during (a)... summit in Caracas, Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, told a few of her colleagues — in private — that Chavez was likely to die as a result of 'his excessive paranoia rather than as a consequence of his serious — yet treatable — cancer,'" wrote Venezuelan consultant Pedro Burelli in a newsletter.
"What she meant to say," Burelli added, "was that by choosing secrecy in Cuba over medical competence at the Sirio-Libanese Hospital in Sao Paulo (where she had been treated successfully for lymphatic cancer) Chavez had condemned himself to a shorter life."
Burelli noted that it corresponded to his own sources, who told him that Chavez's chosen successor, Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro, flew to Brasilia to meet with Rousseff and her oncologist.
He presented the diagnoses from Caracas and Havana and the Brazilian specialist "considered it treatable under world-class protocols available in his center."
Maduro signaled interest. But the Chavista regime then demanded to pretty much take over the 400-bed hospital, which the Brazilians rejected. "From that moment on the patient was doomed," Burelli wrote.
The Cubans, it turned out, gave Chávez the wrong cancer treatment — probably radiation or chemotherapy, which has limits on uses — and, as a result, were unable to correct it after they discovered the error. That doomed Chávez, a victim of the very Castrocare he touted, as Bernie Sanders does now, as the solution to all of Venezuela's ills. Venezuela's hospitals now look like Cuba's or, given the lack of water, electricity, and money, probably worse. But it was Castrocare itself, the elites-tier version, that did Chávez in.
Would Bernie Sanders consent to Cuban-style health care for his own heart condition? Not if he wanted to live. The examples of Castro, treated with Western medicine, and Chávez, going down with a treatable illness made untreatable by Castrocare, tell the whole story about the worth of such a system.
Someone should ask him.
Image credit: Photo illustration by Jari Carr via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Bernie Sanders got himself into hot water with Florida's voters by praising Cuba's "literacy programs," which were ugly coercive propaganda efforts for those who experienced them.
It's far from the only thing he's praised about the Castroite communist hellhole. According to the New York Times:
MIAMI — In the spring of 1989, as the outgoing mayor of Burlington, Vt., Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane, traveled to Cuba on an eight-day trip, with the hopes of meeting the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro.
The 47-year-old Mr. Sanders didn't get time with Mr. Castro, but he toured Havana, met with its mayor and marveled that visitors could take a cab anywhere in the country. "The revolution there is far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be," he said back home, according to The Burlington Free Press, and commended Cuba for providing free health care, free education and free housing.
Free health care? That one's worth a teaching moment for Bernie, too.
Not only do citizens get experiences like this, but it's worth noting that even Fidel Castro himself knew better than to use it. Socialist systems may create two-tier health care systems for the ordinary people and the elites, which is bad enough, but in the absence of any innovation and the only incentives to "excellence" being political ones, even the elites' system eventually goes to hell, too, at least on life-or-death matters.
Castro knew this, which is why he decided to import his doctor from Spain to treat his malignant diverticulitis.
His little pawn, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, wasn't quite as savvy. He actually believed the lies about Cuba's free health care system — and with some sort of internal cancer, paid for his faith in Castrocare with his life.
Shortly before Chávez's 2013 death in a Cuban hospital, the truth came out about the disastrous state of Cuban health care — even for the elites — back when I was writing editorials at Investor's Business Daily:
Americas: Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is dying of cancer in Havana, in a live demonstration of Cuba's vaunted socialized medical care. He went there instead of Brazil because he wanted to make a political statement. What irony.
...and...
Most galling for him: It didn't have to happen this way.
His expected demise will be entirely due to his gullibility to leftist propaganda and bad choices that came of it.
"In July 2011, during (a)... summit in Caracas, Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, told a few of her colleagues — in private — that Chavez was likely to die as a result of 'his excessive paranoia rather than as a consequence of his serious — yet treatable — cancer,'" wrote Venezuelan consultant Pedro Burelli in a newsletter.
"What she meant to say," Burelli added, "was that by choosing secrecy in Cuba over medical competence at the Sirio-Libanese Hospital in Sao Paulo (where she had been treated successfully for lymphatic cancer) Chavez had condemned himself to a shorter life."
Burelli noted that it corresponded to his own sources, who told him that Chavez's chosen successor, Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro, flew to Brasilia to meet with Rousseff and her oncologist.
He presented the diagnoses from Caracas and Havana and the Brazilian specialist "considered it treatable under world-class protocols available in his center."
Maduro signaled interest. But the Chavista regime then demanded to pretty much take over the 400-bed hospital, which the Brazilians rejected. "From that moment on the patient was doomed," Burelli wrote.
The Cubans, it turned out, gave Chávez the wrong cancer treatment — probably radiation or chemotherapy, which has limits on uses — and, as a result, were unable to correct it after they discovered the error. That doomed Chávez, a victim of the very Castrocare he touted, as Bernie Sanders does now, as the solution to all of Venezuela's ills. Venezuela's hospitals now look like Cuba's or, given the lack of water, electricity, and money, probably worse. But it was Castrocare itself, the elites-tier version, that did Chávez in.
Would Bernie Sanders consent to Cuban-style health care for his own heart condition? Not if he wanted to live. The examples of Castro, treated with Western medicine, and Chávez, going down with a treatable illness made untreatable by Castrocare, tell the whole story about the worth of such a system.
Someone should ask him.
Image credit: Photo illustration by Jari Carr via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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