Brains, Now With The Consequences of Free Healthcare

[elfs]

Friends of mine who were praising the Cuban health care system last week had best consider this Washington Post article this morning:

Twenty-six patients at Cuba's largest hospital for the mentally ill died this week during a cold snap, the government said Friday.

Human rights leaders cited negligence and a lack of resources as factors in the deaths, and the Health Ministry launched an investigation that it said could lead to criminal proceedings.

...

Communist Cuba provides free health care to all its citizens but, though the quality of its medical system is celebrated in leftist circles around Latin America, it is also plagued by shortages. Patients are expected to bring their own sheets and towels and sometimes their own food during hospital stays.

But, hey, at least it's free, right?

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All the Linux Format magazine's Gimp tutorials in one file!

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Color Theory in one beautiful poster

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jQuery Plug-In Design Patterns. Essential reading if you work with jQuery and end up doing a lot of unobtrusive work.

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The Truth about the Uncanny Valley (hint: We get over it pretty quick once we've processed the encounter well enough to realize that what we are talking to is not a sick or deformed human being.)

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They can't vote. They can't go to jail. Some of them are hundreds of years old. And even though they can fuck you hard, they're not human. Why do non-human entities have free speech rights? Lawrence Lessig says it's time to reconsider the personhood of corporations.

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And finally, Andrew Sullivan on recent developments:

So, we have a government fused with corporations, a legislature run by corporate lobbyists who have just been given a massive financial gift to control the process even more deeply; we have a theory of executive power advanced by one party that gives the president total extra-legal power over any human being he wants to call an "enemy combatant" and total prerogative in launching and waging wars (remember Cheney did not believe Bush needed any congressional support to invade Iraq); we have a Supreme Court that believes in extreme deference to presidential power; we have a Congress of total pussies on the left and maniacs on the right and little in the middle; we have a 24-hour propaganda channel, run by a multinational corporation and managed by a partisan Republican, demonizing the president for anything he does or does not do; we have the open embrace of torture as a routine aspect of US government; and we have one party urging an expansion of the war on Jihadism to encompass a full-scale war against Iran, an act that would embolden the Khamenei junta and ensure that a civilizational war between the nuttiest Christianists in America and the vilest Islamists metastasizes to Def Con 3.

There's a word that characterizes this kind of polity. It's on the tip of my tongue ..

Comments

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Heh. You have to love a press corps... hell, *anyone* who makes claims like "there's shortages in Cuban hospitals because health care is free there".

It's not just in hospitals in Cuba that there's shortages. Maybe you could blame it all on the fact that they're communist. Or maaaayyyybe... you could blame it on the trade embargo that's lasted uh, 40 years? No, that would never have anything to do with it.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Only the United States has a trade embargo with Cuba. No other country in the Western Hemisphere does, and it's pure fantasy to imagine that our embargo interferes with Cuba's trade relations with South American countries.

Besides, the embargo does not cover medicines or medical equipment.

Cuba has a fundamentally broken economy that fails to reward efficiency or innovation. That's why there are shortages.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Cuba has a fundamentally-broken economy because it was to the Soviet-Union what Israel is to the U.S.

Soviet foreign aid was the main piece of the Cuban economy. When the Soviet Union fell apart nearly 2 decades ago, so did the Cuban economy.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

That may be true, but then again: after the USSR fell, its client states in eastern europe instantly evaporated. Cuba, like Viet Nam, has had a continuous and largely stable communist government without really much of a hiccup ever since. You could well argue that Cuba was one of the two most successful Soviet client states.

Not that that's anything to aspire to...

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

From what I recall of the events 18 years ago, the Eastern Bloc nations were no longer Eastern Bloc countries at all. They went their own way a few years earlier, in 1989. Vietnam wasn't financially-dependent on the Soviet Union.

Cuba was.

(So was North Korea, and it, too, has been in utter economic collapse since 1991.)

[gromm.livejournal.com]

According to the article (which is pretty thin on facts), there is little evidence that shortages of anything led to these deaths (with the possible exception of advanced cancer treatments). For that matter, it's highly unlikely that the weather had anything to do with it either, because unless there were shortages of glass for windows, all you have to do in a country like Cuba when the temperature dips so low (heh) is close the doors and windows at night.

But hey, when you want to make a case against socialized health care, *any* deaths in hospitals will do. Nevermind that first-world countries like Germany also have free health care.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Actually, the USA enforces the trade embargo on Cuba regardless of which country is sending the goods.

Ships or planes that happen to stop at USA-controlled ports routinely have their manifests searched, and any embargoed goods bound for Cuba are seized regardless of where they come from, who owns them, or is carrying them .

This means that it's almost impossible to trade with Cuba unless you want to risk the USA confiscating your trade goods, because unless you're chartering a whole ship (and few companies can afford that), you have no way of knowing whether the goods you're shipping will pass through a USA-controlled port or airport.

This is done against international law, but obviously it's very hard to get the USA government and it's agencies to return or compensate for goods that are stolen by them like this , even when they are ordered to by the international court, as the USA only recognized the rule of law when it wants to.

As you may be able to tell I have personal experience with this.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

I was thinking, this morning, that we need a new law declaring that the rights of the individual citizen are always paramount, and that artificial entities comprised of groups of citizens DO NOT, NOR EVER SHALL BE ENTITLED THE RIGHTS HELD BY INDIVIDUALS.

The individual members of the organization already have full rights. That is sufficient.


But it won't happen. The Sheeple in this country won't stand up until it's far, far too late to fix the problem without years of bloodshed.

[(Anonymous)]

I actually don't think the problem here is the personhood of corporations. I think that's an incredibly dumb idea, but it's not the reason this particular court decision is so fucked up.

In fact, unlike most of the other amendments, the First Amendment is unusual for not phrasing freedom of speech as an individual right, but rather as a blanket restriction on what the government can do. I'm no lawyer, but my naive reading of the Constitution leads me to be believe that corporations deserve the right to freedom of speech just as much as you or me, regardless of whether they're legally considered a "person" or not. "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech" applies to them as much as to us.

No, the problem stems from the equally controversial notion that the application of money constitutes "speech." The right to speak does not imply the right to be heard and, while I'm fully in favor of corporations being able to speak freely by having their boards of directors write up a press release, I disagree with the idea that they should be able to fund campaigns arbitrarily -- to the point of funding several competing candidates, even. After a certain point it stops being simple political support, and becomes bribery.

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