Email this article
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 22, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------World Health Organization report
Cuba is catching up to U.S. in healthy life span
By Scott Scheffer
An infant born in Cuba today will more than likely live a longer healthy life—68.4 years—than an infant born in a poor neighborhood in the United States, according to a June 4 World Health Organization news release.
Cuba has the best rating in all Latin America, the release notes, "despite decades of a U.S. trade embargo."
Vietnam, another socialist country that has suffered great damage from the United States, "has been improving dramatically in health profiles and healthy life expectancy."
The People's Republic of China, too, was commended for "a very impressive performance."
But the capitalist United States-the richest country in the world--fell behind 23 other countries in healthy life expectancy.
The release cited the results of a study that uses a new system to examine the state of health of each country's population. Called Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy, it calculates the expected years of a person's healthy life, as opposed to just life expectancy.
Japan has the highest rating: 74.5 years. The next nine on the list are European countries.
The WHO says the study revealed a wider gap between developing countries and rich industrialized countries than was expected. Generally speaking, the statistics showed a correlation between healthy life expectancy and how poor or rich a country is.
Therefore, the failure of the United States to be rated in the top 10 is described as "one of the major surprises" of the WHO study. It is ranked 24th.
What good is technology if you can't afford it?
According to Dr. Christopher Murray, director of WHO's Global Program on Evidence for Health Policy, the wide gap between rich and poor people's access to health care has pulled the U.S. average way down.
"The reason it is 24th is that there are groups that have been left out of the advances in health we have seen for most of the U.S. population for the last two or three decades," says Murray.
The WHO release summarizing the study says more pointedly, "Some groups, such as Native Americans, rural African Americans and the inner city poor, have extremely poor health, more characteristic of a poor developing country rather than a rich industrialized one."
The fact that the people of Cuba, China and Vietnam fare as well as--or in the case of Cuba better than--the poor people of the United States affirms that access to health care is a more important factor in health and longevity than the size of a country's economy. All three countries have made it a priority to spread good health the way U.S. capitalism spreads fast-food restaurants.
The United States falls way behind even other rich capitalist countries. They have all instituted varying forms of national health care under the pressure of large, organized working-class movements, many of these movements led for decades by socialists and communists.
Here, however, the health-care industry is dominated by giant insurance/hospital corporations. They defeated even the weak health-care initiative put forth in the first Clinton administration.
If apologists for U.S. capitalism feel stung by the results of this report, more recent news will surely rub some salt in their wounds. The study's results were made public only days after a U.S. Congressional Black Caucus delegation visited Havana.
There they were told by President Fidel Castro that Cuba would offer free medical training to U.S. students willing to commit to be physicians in poor neighborhoods back home.
The latest WHO bulletin announces the inaugural conference of the International Society for Equity in Health. This conference will be held in Havana on June 29-30, and it is another indicator of how serious Cuba is about promoting health care.
The fact that three socialist countries, all struggling against aggression by U.S. imperialism, have provided health care for their populations in such an impressive way gives working-class and oppressed people hope. It heralds a day when people's ownership along with centralized planning will be the basis for wiping out hunger and disease worldwide.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)HOME :: U.S. NEWS :: WORLD NEWS :: EDITORIALS :: SUBSCRIBE :: DONATE