The Cuban Medical System both Myth and Reality
Cuba, international solidarity
x Miguel Ángel Maciel: Health and education: no to privatization :: Bankers and politicians: "Take your hands out of the Public Services"
The Coronavirus has shown the worst and the best of governments. Regarding the second, we can account for the concrete actions that the Cuban government has taken to contain the pandemic that has already been declared global by the World Health Organization (WHO). The most remarkable thing that the Cuban government has done is share with the world the medicine that helps to treat COVID-19. Although there is still no vaccine to eliminate this virus, interferon alfa 2B, a Cuban medicine which from the beginning was shared with the Chinese government to treat its infected patients, has already been requested by different countries in Latin America, Asia and Europe.
The international solidarity that Cuba has shown towards the countries of the world is not in dispute, especially when it was recently learned that the island received a British cruise ship with 5 people detected with COVID-19 on board. The Cuban government, with everything and the complications of receiving infected people, especially considering that some countries have already chosen to close their borders, demonstrated that solidarity is the main value that should rule in times of difficulty and pressure world.
On the other hand, the United States, with all its economic, political, military and technological power, has demonstrated that it cannot assure the health of its citizens, since up to now it has been documented that there are more than 120 thousand people infected with coronavirus. What Uncle Sam has done to try to solve this problem is to try to negotiate an emergency package which includes a trillion dollars to [supposedly] help the affected Americans, in such a way that it will take care of the State to distribute money already that, as is known, the United States does not have public health services that assure its citizens not to get into debt with the private health services offered by that country.
The measures adopted by the US to help its citizens are not considered "populist" or "welfare" actions, since in an emergency such as COVID-19 even the most capitalist and center-right countries have had to resort to the State and accept that it is necessary to support citizens. In other words, what was previously used as an argument to attack and criticize those countries that decide to use the State to ensure education, health and food, today reality spits in their faces when they see that capitalism and the market are not the solution as different services of a purely social and welfare nature have been privatized.
This is the main difference between capitalism and socialism. While the first yearns to concentrate large amounts of wealth at the expense of its citizens and although they do not even have to pay for private insurance, the second places human safety, health and stability at the center. Much criticism may be leveled at the Cuban government, but it is at this time that the true capacity and potential of an island so small that for decades it has been neglected, blocked, seized and attacked by a huge world power is demonstrated.
It seems that the American dream turns into a nightmare when the real world problems are just around the corner. The country of opportunities shrinks and becomes weak, because while the US exports the military to the world and distributes economic sanctions to any country that decides to be independent, sovereign and far from the American way of life, on the other hand, a small island that has not been exported for years Doctors to the world, share their medicine to prevent more deaths and show that solidarity is what can save us from any catastrophe.
Capitalism, its doctors and its medicines Philosophy of Health
A sick society profits even from diseases
Capitalism, its doctors and its medicines Philosophy of Health
As long as the health (or illnesses) of the towns are a trade of mercachifles in which many laboratories, universities, government institutions, hospitals and doctors are seized like vampires ... while there are entire people and towns without medical security ... while The pathological habits and mania that the advertising mafias inoculate against public health reign ... we will live a monstrous injustice that has become natural as part of the miserable decoration of the societies divided into classes. Every day, at dawn, the lines of people outside the hospitals, waiting for a consultation, suffer huge lists of human rights violations while, for example, the pharmaceutical industry (13 of the 20 most voracious) Installed in Puerto Rico, it receives alligator tax benefits and moves healthy fortunes in the order of 60 billion dollars.
Capitalism trains doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers like an army of mercenary vendors is trained in cynical analysis, diagnostic studies, surgeries, medications, and therapies. Humanistic subjects and reflections, social conscience, shine brilliantly due to their absence and precariousness. Their heads are uniformed with bourgeois aspirations and dreams (stereotyped to nausea) so that they shamelessly display their loyalty to convince the business owners of the laboratories that previously trained their bosses. “Pfizer is currently the largest pharmaceutical company, with a reported $ 45 billion in profitability. Multinational companies including Glaxo Smith Kline, Merck & CO., Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, Aventis, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Wyeth and Eli Lilly, accounted for 58.4% of the market at around $ 322 billion in earnings. ”1
You have to see the arrogance and arrogance that many heads of section, guard, department ... walk in every clinic, hospital or laboratory in front of nurses, students and workers who must learn primarily to turn their humiliation into good grades, diplomas, special appointments or awards ... such as attendance at conferences, the publication of "papers" and gifts from the laboratories. We are not scared, nor do we silence, the drugs that are wrapped with terminological and statistical swarms to immolate themselves in the realm of arch-specialized scholarship and where not only are the most obvious complaints not accepted, but they are seen as “bad taste” protests " Of these great demagogues, technocrats and bureaucrats, the academies and associations of specialists are full ... and many hospitals. Not all, of course ... of course. But. Many students are trained with "technical" excellence to sustain the class servitude that justifies the business and also justifies some gifts of medical philanthropy that, with its messianic ethics, benefits some poor in hospitals for the poor and with bureaucracy for the poor.
Is this greatly exaggerated?
Doctors, nurses, and health workers are often trained to adopt reactionary ideas and mediocre behavior as their own and original. Their heroics are reduced to being subservient and meek with business and bringing to the kingdom of their individualism the glories of bank accounts and earthly goods. Their heroicity has as its alma mater a merciless vanity trained daily in the concentration camp to which they subject their "patients" and their families. Many "little doctors" make themselves pay for their magnanimity with eternal thanks, and compliments, thanks to extorting everyone with the old trick of haggling information, speaking in a didactic and condescending tone, playing at the fact that time never reaches them and getting out of their sleeves miracle solutions. Many under the shotgun method ... some shot will hit the partridge. The more drugs they try ... the better gifts the laboratories will send. There is an international ranking of awards in hotels, airlines and varied merchandising. Doctors, nurses, and health workers learn it from the first lessons.
They dream of infecting our lives with saliva from servile bureaucrats to the neoliberal butchery, they are "doctors" inoculated with a usury epidemic among the pharmaceutical markets, an infected broth of neoliberal demagoguery, the weight of misery and crime, hunger, unemployment, injustice galloping. We pay for it. They call themselves "doctors" to hide their arrogance and sufficiency from ignorant, functional indolents to misery, malnutrition, destroyed hospitals, dilapidated schools, rot and stink left and right. Depression, bad mood, hopelessness, satiety, sadness, melancholy, anger ... fury ... hatred. Tiredness and loneliness, humiliated workers. Elderly victims of indolence ... sick, eaten away by bureaucracy. Children look stunned at the future we inherited from them. It is a monstrosity. We live infested with neglect. The poorest are more unprotected, they are not well fed, they cannot go to the doctor, it is impossible to pay for medicines, and in general they have no possibility of attending to their health. It is not a small thing.
We know that the war on corrupt medicine must be a war on capitalism, too. The pharmaceutical laboratory business has taken a monstrous slice. And we have not seen the worst. We know that drug manufacturing corporations own the safety of thousands or millions of people. Cynicism reigns. We know that the health crisis expresses capitalist irrationality. Monopolies impose their businesses as if they were health policies and impose market conditions to speculate with drugs and prices. They own the health of millions of human beings.
What about ethical thinking about health?
It is clear that the obscene pachanga of dealing with diseases, reaching millions in any currency, requires government managers in charge of legalizing the trick and devising creative mechanisms to extract more juice from the victims. That is why they build hospitals whose class seal guarantees a perfect consumption model for the level of corruption reached by the "little doctors" and their cronies. For example, they build hospitals to consume the thousand and one products that, more expensive at government prices, better suit supplier companies; for example, they will spend full-fledged taxes on the towns to ingratiate themselves with manufacturers of appliances and articles of all kinds, to, repeatedly, cover the delivery route with bulk tithes for intermediaries; for example they will put waiting rooms, operating rooms, rooms, corridors, offices and emergency rooms ... at the service of the "Fordist" logic applied to medical care. All this is a tribute to quickly disregarding the "patients" so that they do not fatten the expenses that could threaten the corruption party. Today, in the extreme obscenity of the medical corruption system, patients are forced to bring their sheets, forks, water, bandages and potties to hospitals ... there are not many doctors protesting that.
Many doctors, and their cronies, like to celebrate efficiency and patient care figures. They are drunk on successful statistics that overflow powerpoint charts, books, treatises, and encyclopedias. If each page edited with triumphalist figures involved a person served efficiently ... there would be no health crisis in the world. And medicine would have ceased to be a bourgeois industry to be an inalienable socialist right.
At the apex of the alma mater in medicamented physicians (that is to say, with their minds set on helping to sell medicines, many of them unnecessary) are the pharmaceutical laboratories all knotted into a multinational network of investors who, like in all commerce, govern their tasks by the capitalist laws of supply and demand. Would it surprise us to know how many times they have invented epidemics, pandemics and infections to circulate millions of vaccines, syringes, pills, creams or ointments? The capitalist material base of this world industry supports an ideological -methodological- peak dressed in "science" in which technical operations with financial operations where those who win are the owners of the business have been protocolized. Will they be very offended by this portrait?
Is it little philosophical?
There are not a few doctors who live by lying and lying. They make fanciful fantasies and explanations to win the "trust" of their patient-clients. If there were a worldwide collection on the fantasies invented by many doctors about the behavior of the human organism, and its relationship with prescribed chemicals, we would have an encyclopedia of monumental horror. The bourgeois "philosophy" of the "health industry" has produced during its history an insatiable monster entangled with the most deplorable anecdotes of corruption and impunity. What matters least to them is the eradication of diseases because such a thing diminishes the pharmaceutical income. It does not matter that many of the “medical” products (operating rooms, pharmacies, hospital hotels and all the paraphernalia) do not have proven efficacy… the important thing is to meet the monthly sales and collection goals. That is their "philosophy", period.
Its "philosophy" does not commit to an effective fight against the diseases that overwhelm workers, what matters are royalties and the kidnapping of patents to enjoy exclusivity in the enjoyment of a disease and more if it becomes an epidemic. No matter (there are cases of unfathomable infamies) how toxic medicines, operations or treatments are to people, nor their collateral consequences, associated diseases or death (which capitalism has also turned into business)
Their “philosophy” also consists of investing millions, to hide the business plans related to the research that they call “scientific”. It is not the social good that determines investments or what determines health policies ... it is outright, the search for private financial benefits for a handful of monopolies procured by servile governments. If for that you have to manipulate and falsify data, if for that you have to publish magazines, organize conferences and deliver "Nobel prizes" ... such a heavy industry will not stop. It will not have methodological or moral itch, a dishonest industry that disguises itself with the word Science to hide its "philosophy" from business.
The list of lightness and errors with which the industrial manufacture of medicines is handled is enormous. There are complaints and debates that are generally hidden because they ugly the panorama. The pharmaceutical industry has controls on the vast majority of specialized publications and journals for scientific dissemination. The pharmaceutical industry spends fortunes on advertising and gifts for its favorite doctors. It is a dictatorship of the pharmaceutical business.
Doctors are the third leading cause of death in the US: They cause 250,000 deaths per year.2 Not all, of course, not all.
Is everything so wrong?
We have Cuba, for example. Some indispensable tasks to overcome the pathologies generated by the medical-pharmaceutical industry of capitalism should happen at this time for the expropriation, without payment, and under workers' control, of all the obscene business that today roams the world with impunity. There are no alternatives. Capitalism is a crime3 and a hellish machinery of producing ecological crisis, disease and death. At this time it is necessary to reformulate all our theoretical-methodological conceptions in health and socialist health policies. Take advantage of the best achievements, those that are really useful and free them from the clutches of capitalism. Reformulate our ideas and preconceptions about the human organism, its interdependencies with all of nature, its development and its current situation.
There are not a few doctors who live by lying and lying. They make fanciful fantasies and explanations to win the "trust" of their patient-clients. If there were a worldwide collection on the fantasies invented by many doctors about the behavior of the human organism, and its relationship with prescribed chemicals, we would have an encyclopedia of monumental horror. The bourgeois "philosophy" of the "health industry" has produced during its history an insatiable monster entangled with the most deplorable anecdotes of corruption and impunity. What matters least to them is the eradication of diseases because such a thing diminishes the pharmaceutical income. It does not matter that many of the “medical” products (operating rooms, pharmacies, hospital hotels and all the paraphernalia) do not have proven efficacy… the important thing is to meet the monthly sales and collection goals. That is their "philosophy", period.
Its "philosophy" does not commit to an effective fight against the diseases that overwhelm workers, what matters are royalties and the kidnapping of patents to enjoy exclusivity in the enjoyment of a disease and more if it becomes an epidemic. No matter (there are cases of unfathomable infamies) how toxic medicines, operations or treatments are to people, nor their collateral consequences, associated diseases or death (which capitalism has also turned into business)
Their “philosophy” also consists of investing millions, to hide the business plans related to the research that they call “scientific”. It is not the social good that determines investments or what determines health policies ... it is outright, the search for private financial benefits for a handful of monopolies procured by servile governments. If for that you have to manipulate and falsify data, if for that you have to publish magazines, organize conferences and deliver "Nobel prizes" ... such a heavy industry will not stop. It will not have methodological or moral itch, a dishonest industry that disguises itself with the word Science to hide its "philosophy" from business.
The list of lightness and errors with which the industrial manufacture of medicines is handled is enormous. There are complaints and debates that are generally hidden because they ugly the panorama. The pharmaceutical industry has controls on the vast majority of specialized publications and journals for scientific dissemination. The pharmaceutical industry spends fortunes on advertising and gifts for its favorite doctors. It is a dictatorship of the pharmaceutical business.
Doctors are the third leading cause of death in the US: They cause 250,000 deaths per year.2 Not all, of course, not all.
Is everything so wrong?
We have Cuba, for example. Some indispensable tasks to overcome the pathologies generated by the medical-pharmaceutical industry of capitalism should happen at this time for the expropriation, without payment, and under workers' control, of all the obscene business that today roams the world with impunity. There are no alternatives. Capitalism is a crime3 and a hellish machinery of producing ecological crisis, disease and death. At this time it is necessary to reformulate all our theoretical-methodological conceptions in health and socialist health policies. Take advantage of the best achievements, those that are really useful and free them from the clutches of capitalism. Reformulate our ideas and preconceptions about the human organism, its interdependencies with all of nature, its development and its current situation.
