SO what will Fidel’s biggest positive legacy be? Surely the fact that his country has achieved European life spans and the western hemispheres second best child mortality rates on an annual health budget per capita of $251.
European countries spend ten or fifteen times as much for no better result. In fact, because of their more developed health systems with expensive medicines and gadgets that keep unhealthy people alive, the equal level of lifespan gives a misleading picture. There are fewer respirator years included in the Cuban figure.
Part of DG Health’s remit is sharing best practice between European countries, the Cuban example shows the limitations of such a narrow approach, since their commonality is greater than their system differences. Health budgets are high, and growing, everywhere in Europe. So what can Cuba teach us?
Forget expensive treatments that chisel away a few extra weeks or months at the wroing bookend of life; Public health is the big battleground today; for Europeans are as bloated as their health budgets.
The fact that today’s young obese generation will be the first in history to die earlier than their parents is relatively well known in Europe, but nothing from the various seminars and conferences on this evergreen issue that I have attended at least has suggested an insight. .
Cuba’s situation – partly involuntary - does. Fidel’s kingdom has been under a US embargo for 40 years, so doesn’t have any McDonalds; the fast food revolution has passed it by. There are petrol shortages, so people walk everywhere. Doctors are poorly paid – pay is a big slice of health budgets – and the country trains the best doctors in Latin America in return for which they have to do three years in the Cuban provinces. A lot of US citizens, mostly black, also attend the Pan-American medical school for an apparently free education at the Cuban state’s expense; in the US med school costs $20,000.
There are also exercise groups for the elderly – every morning, iun the subtropical breezes of the parks near the Malecon; and 24-hour policlinics that take the pressure off hospitals. As a middle income country in the 21st century, the country has benefited from the vaccine revolution, and the elimination of childhood diseases; it doesn’t have the ghastly ailments of the tropics; and yet also avoids the tip-over into degeneration suffered by the modern west. Lifestyle wise, the country is stuck in the 1940s and 1950s, in a kind of permanent wartime of rationing and moderation: Brits for their part never ate so well as during the Blitz. A recent Newsnight film showed a lot of old people on porches looking youthful and content; and I am sure the occasional cigar and more rum won’t alter their positive health picture.
Meanwhile, over in America, the average citizen has 14 drugs prescriptions and people tell jokes – ie metaphorical truths – about having medicine cabinets the size of walk-in freezers The news comes out the average American is 50 pounds heavier than his grandfather – though, interestingly, no taller. Here, the Europeans have more than caught up.
We are all adult enough to be able to separate Castro’s one party politics, his round up of journalists and imprisonment of dissidents, to the positive benefits of Cuba, some of them accidental. European health ministers should make a study trip without prejudice, to the land of nutritiously but excessively fed black kids kicking ball or old people doing stretch exercises in Havana. There are two bearded icons whose faces sell T-shirts in the developing world today; Che is the other, better, one; for he began as a doctor.
European countries spend ten or fifteen times as much for no better result. In fact, because of their more developed health systems with expensive medicines and gadgets that keep unhealthy people alive, the equal level of lifespan gives a misleading picture. There are fewer respirator years included in the Cuban figure.
Part of DG Health’s remit is sharing best practice between European countries, the Cuban example shows the limitations of such a narrow approach, since their commonality is greater than their system differences. Health budgets are high, and growing, everywhere in Europe. So what can Cuba teach us?
Forget expensive treatments that chisel away a few extra weeks or months at the wroing bookend of life; Public health is the big battleground today; for Europeans are as bloated as their health budgets.
The fact that today’s young obese generation will be the first in history to die earlier than their parents is relatively well known in Europe, but nothing from the various seminars and conferences on this evergreen issue that I have attended at least has suggested an insight. .
Cuba’s situation – partly involuntary - does. Fidel’s kingdom has been under a US embargo for 40 years, so doesn’t have any McDonalds; the fast food revolution has passed it by. There are petrol shortages, so people walk everywhere. Doctors are poorly paid – pay is a big slice of health budgets – and the country trains the best doctors in Latin America in return for which they have to do three years in the Cuban provinces. A lot of US citizens, mostly black, also attend the Pan-American medical school for an apparently free education at the Cuban state’s expense; in the US med school costs $20,000.
There are also exercise groups for the elderly – every morning, iun the subtropical breezes of the parks near the Malecon; and 24-hour policlinics that take the pressure off hospitals. As a middle income country in the 21st century, the country has benefited from the vaccine revolution, and the elimination of childhood diseases; it doesn’t have the ghastly ailments of the tropics; and yet also avoids the tip-over into degeneration suffered by the modern west. Lifestyle wise, the country is stuck in the 1940s and 1950s, in a kind of permanent wartime of rationing and moderation: Brits for their part never ate so well as during the Blitz. A recent Newsnight film showed a lot of old people on porches looking youthful and content; and I am sure the occasional cigar and more rum won’t alter their positive health picture.
Meanwhile, over in America, the average citizen has 14 drugs prescriptions and people tell jokes – ie metaphorical truths – about having medicine cabinets the size of walk-in freezers The news comes out the average American is 50 pounds heavier than his grandfather – though, interestingly, no taller. Here, the Europeans have more than caught up.
We are all adult enough to be able to separate Castro’s one party politics, his round up of journalists and imprisonment of dissidents, to the positive benefits of Cuba, some of them accidental. European health ministers should make a study trip without prejudice, to the land of nutritiously but excessively fed black kids kicking ball or old people doing stretch exercises in Havana. There are two bearded icons whose faces sell T-shirts in the developing world today; Che is the other, better, one; for he began as a doctor.
