A respected group of doctors, medical educators, health professionals and scholars, whose interest in Cuba is professional, not political, blasted John Stossel's 20/20 report last Friday.
Eleven doctor and other health professionals sent the strongly worded letter to the President of ABC News protesting, "The piece is blatanly biased, inaccurate and misleading. Both the news and medical professions are evidence-based, so we were aghast to see 20/20 report as fact things that simply are not true."
Neither Mr.Westin or Mr. Stossel would comment on the charges." (See my earlier post: What Has John Stossel Been Smoking?)
The letter continued, "We are troubled by the fact that the Stossel report appears to start with a political bias - Cuba is a poor, communist country, so it can't possibly have a successful health care system - that ignores facts that deviate from the premise.
"We are compelled to set the record straight.
"We do not intend to promote Cuba's health care system as a "model" for the U.S. to adopt, but, to its credit, this small, resource-poor nation does make health care available to all its citizens, with no price tag attached. Colin Powell acknowledged as much in his confirmation hearing as Secretary of State in 2001. The 20/20 report disparages the key lesson of the Cuban health care experience: that even the poorest society or community can guarantee its people access to health care and improve their lives by making health a serious priority. That's both a lesson and a challenge to our own country. (See my previous post: Cuba Has Better Medical Care Than the U.S.)
"About the report itself: Most astonishing is the complete absence of balance. Mr. Stossel did not seek comments from working health professionals in Cuba; instead, he cites as fact the opinions of one sector of Cuban exiles in Miami. The only organization he cites to refute the claims of "Sicko" director Michael Moore was the Central Intelligence Agency (which differed with Cuban government statistics on life expectancy by less than one year).
"Finally, the photographs shown are taken from an unabashedly biased and dubious blog run by Cuban exiles.
"More importantly, the so-called facts Mr. Stossel presents are just plain wrong.
--- Cuba's health statistics are not "made up" by government officials to portray a false, glowing picture of public health. In fact, the country admits that maternal deaths are still a problem, as are increased threats from diabetes, obesity and rising rates of several cancers. The 20/20 piece dismisses the validity of statistics from the United Nations and the World Health Organization because they come from Cuban health officials, but Mr. Stossel fails to mention that this is how UN statistics are gathered from all countries. Nor does he bother to point out that other sources such as the Pan American Health Organization, which maintain permanent offices in Havana, and regularly send evaluation teams to Cuba, have issued positive reports after firsthand assessments from making their own trips to provinces across the country.
Many of us have also witnessed how Cuban health statistics are put together, and have direct knowledge of the Ministry of Public Health's Statistics Department and the Health Tendencies Analysis Unit, which teamed up with PAHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during a neuropathy epidemic in Cuba some years ago.
--- Cuba's economic problems during the 1990s resulted in the physical deterioration of many of its hospitals. However, 52 of these hospitals are now undergoing needed repairs and remodeling. Although Mr. Moore and his 9/11 responders did go to one of the refurbished facilities, this hospital serves 156,000 people living in one of Havana's most overcrowded neighborhoods. It is not a hospital reserved for government elites or foreigners.
--- The claim that Cuban women are commonly subjected to forced abortions is patently false. By law, abortion in Cuba is accessible and free. But for years, abortion rates have been dropping, not climbing. When congenital malformations occur during pregnancy, women are informed of their options and permitted to make a personal decision, as they are in many other countries. In fact, entire facilities such as the Children's Heart Center in Havana and a national network of special schools are dedicated to children who are born with congenital problems.
"When it comes to health care, Cuba manages to do a lot with a little, scoring comparably with the United States on many health indicators at a fraction of the cost. A Gallup Poll conducted last year revealed that 96 percent of Cuban citizens said they had regular access to health care, no matter who they were or what their income.
"We urge ABC NEWS to correct the false statements and impressions presented in Mr. Stossel's report."
Sincerely,
Peter G. Bourne, MD, MA - Chair, MEDICC Board of Directors www.medicc.org - Visiting Scholar at Green College, Oxford University.
Alfred W. Brann Jr., MD - Professor of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine
Harry E. Douglas III, DPA (Retired) - former Executive Vice President and former Interim President, Charles Drew University of Medicine & Science. Chair, Board of Regents, Southern California University of Health Sciences
Dabney Evans, MPH, CHES - Department of Global Health, Emory University
Rollins School of Public Health
Jean Handy, PhD - Associate Director of Microbiology and Immunology, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill
C. William Keck, MD, MPH, FACPM - Professor and Associate Dean, Northwestern Ohio Universities College of Medicine (NEOUCOM), past president - American Public Health Association
Albert S. Kuperman, PhD - Associate Dean for Educational Affairs, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, USA
F. Javier Nieto, MD, PhD - Professor and Chair, Department of Population Health Sciences,
University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health
Gail A. Reed, MS - International Director, MEDICC
Patricia Rodney, RN, MPH, PhD - Director MPH Program & Associate Professor
Morehouse School of Medicine Master of Public Health Program
Ronald K. St. John, MD, MPH - CEO & President, Global Health News Network Corporation
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While it is true that most Cubans have access to health care, the sad truth is that this care is unacceptably inadequate for the vast majority of the population. The letter writers are indignant that ABC dared to solicit information from exiles. Why should this be a problem? Who would know better what is going on in Cuba than the two million Cubans who have fled from it, preferring to start their lives over in some other country, penniless and uninsured, rather than to remain on that island with its “wondrous” health care.
Eyewitness accounts of the many failures of the Cuban system are often tagged as “biased” or “untrue” on the assumption that Cuban exiles are selfish cranks. This same logic would also discount the testimony of Holocaust survivors and accept only that of the Nazis who tried to kill them.
It is true that Cuban health care is beset by a lack of resources, due primarily to the embargo. But, apart for their "special period" in the 90s (worse than our Great Depression) the stories of lacking basic medicine is BS. Still, their comparative lack of hi-tech resources makes their achievements all the more striking.
As for anecdotes, I am sure all American could tell you a horror story about our system. I just was told one by a co-worker of a friend who died because she could not afford to go to a specialist and have her terrible cough looked at. Her job fired her. She became homeless and died alone in an SRO. Thousands die needlessly like this in the US. In Cuba, no one dies for lack of access to a doctor.
In the 60s all the "experts" were telling us what a great society there was in the Soviet Union.
Then, when the truth got out, we were told that a single sheet of toilet paper was worth more than a Soviet rouble and their health care was not much better.
We were told they were a "great military threat" then I saw some of their equipment and recognized it was junk.
Cuba lets out only what they want you to think. One day the truth will come out and, if it were a laughing matter, the exiles would have the last laugh. Unfortunately, they will only cry more at the realization it is worse than they remembered. All those "experts" who claim that Cuba is a medical paradise won't shed a tear nor feel any remorse for supporting Castro and the pain and suffering he caused, they will simply start extolling another paradise like North Korea.
Maybe, before Castro is declared dead, a few of these "experts", instead of being "useful idiots" could become "regular" Cuban citizens and experience the real horror of Cuban medicine
If that is the quality of health care which we could achieve at a great savings to our current system, please leave me out.
I also wonder why this post makes the glaring omission of the fact that these MEDDICC doctors and said organization are responsible for the whiteashing "documentary" called Salud! which depicts the Cuban healthcare system in such a peripheral, biased way that makes anyone having dealt with said system have their head spinning from such falsities. Could it be that these doctors arent as concerned for the truth being spoken but for their lack of integrity being exposed?
As for the pictures being from exiles as mentioned above, had ABC had the integrity to run the videos and piece in total, without fear of Cuban governmnet reprisals, the world wouyld have been privy to actual footage from Cuban hosptials and patients as taken by actual Cubans on the island, including a few Cuban doctors and other medical personnel.
This issue raised here isnt about healthcare, its about politics and how some "medical professionals" make bunk of their oathes and profession by supporting and siding with a socialist dictatorship with a history of misrepresentation.
Plainly apparent though, to anyone not myopic with political agenda, is the fact that the rafts only head one way, despite the "great healthcare" or, maybe, if one asks the rafters, because of it.
Case in point, where is the bias in the premise that because Cuba is "a poor, communist country...it can't possibly have a successful health care system?" Was it not proven time and time again, since the Revolution of 1917 that communism is an ineffectual system? Why then would this premise be "biased" it seems like common sense.
Let me put it more succinctly, communism is a failed system. Where else but in a communist country can the formerly largest sugar producing nation on earth suffer from sugar scarcity? I know this for a fact because I lived in Cuba and I have relatives who have lived all of their lives in Cuba and I get this information first hand.
To discard the testimony of Cuban exiles as biased is in itself bias. Who better to bear witness to the situation than those who lived it? We never discarded the testimony of blacks under apartheid, Jews in Nazi Germany, or Chileans under Pinochet, yet, somehow any time that a Cuban exile bears witness to the persecution and equity of life under Castroism, it is filppantly discarded.
By the way, Cuba's distoration began long before the 1990's [euphemistically known as the "special period"], it began in 1959.
I can tell you horror stories that happened to my family in Cuba hospitals in the 1960's and 70's when Cuba was still receiving billions of dollars annually from the former Soviet Union. At the rist of not being believed, because I am a "biased" Cuban exile, I had a young cousin who fell on broken glass and had to be rushed to a hospital and stitched up. This happened in the late 1960's. They stitched him up with anesthesia, because the hospital did not have any. The boy was on the 3rd floor of the hospital and you could hear his screams of anguish all the way on the first floor!
Cuba's healthcare system IS a horror.
In short, those medical professionals who signed this article are guilty of nothing less than failing to uphold the Hippocratic Oath. As Cubans, are we not human, deserving of the same healthcare system enjoyed by government fat-cats and foreign tourists who revel in our misery? Yes. As Cubans, we live, we love, we breathe, we die. We never deserved the fate we were given on January 1, 1959, and we certainly never deserved the callous disregard exhibited by those individuals who have the audacity to shoot-down, what is perhaps the first honest criticism of the Cuban healthcare apartheid system that has ever appeared on nationwide television.
A doctor that supports the totalitarian system in Cuba is a doctor who has turned his back on the Hippocratic Oath. We deserve quality healthcare and above all – the freedom to choose our own destiny. Anything less is insufficient, gentlemen.
That said, I’ll be the first to offer those of you who signed this ludicrous document, my hand in friendship. Perhaps we, the Cuban people, can assist in educating our brothers and sisters across the globe with regards to the evils inherent in any totalitarian system. Lord knows we’ve got the experience and I’ll never turn my back on someone with an open mind. Just view us as your brothers, your fellow man. That is all I ask.
Respectfully,
Anatasio Blanco
We were lucky, after several days of begging, groveling, string-pulling and bribes, we were able to have Martha treated at Havana’s Hospital Hermanos Almejeiras. Sound familiar? That’s because Hermanos Almejeiras is the same hospital Michael Moore took that group of 9/11 victims to during his vaunted film. That’s the same hospital which Moore claims is open to “all Cubans.” If that were so, Mr. Moore, why were we forced to beg, grovel and bribe in order to gain access.
The bottom line here is simple. There exists in the mentality of those individuals who continue to support the decrepit healthcare system under which, we the Cuban people, continue to suffer, a blatant prejudice that extends back half-a-century. “Those crazy Cuban exiles are at it again!” To those individuals who continue to support the island’s system of medical apartheid, all Cubans who share a hatred of the dictatorship that has quashed so many of their dreams for the past 50 years, are “Batistianos.” We are all the heirs of vast fortunes. We are all former members of right-wing paramilitary death squads. We are all liars and historical revisionists. “Those crafty brown-skins and their lies!”
What?
Stossel’s recent piece concerning Michael Moore and the Cuban healthcare system is perhaps the first time that the facts surrounding that contentious topic have ever been presented.
Allow me to take what is for Cubans – both on and off the island – one of the most blatant failures of the system and present it in as basic and personal a manner as possible. This is the story of an average Cuban battling the island’s blatant system of healthcare apartheid as it happened to me this past August. Take it or leave it, it is what it is.
Upon my arrival in Havana recently, I was informed that my aunt Martha (yes, I will be changing name here, folks) would need to have her gallbladder removed. This is of course, a rather simple procedure common with women of her age, 70. Three of us – my older cousin Rogelio, my aunt Martha, and me – set off to the hospital for a pre-surgical checkup with her attending phycisian. At the moment, I am unable to recall the name of the facility but that is rather inconsequential. The fact of the matter is, that hospital, a facility meant to treat average Cubans, was filthy. The floors appeared as if they hadn’t been mopped in weeks, cockroaches skittered about the rooms of patients and even the most basic supplies – bed linens, hospital gowns and simple medications, were unavailable to those being treated there. Your average Cuban, when facing a hospital stay, is normally forced to seek funds from relatives off the island, for the purchase of even the most basic supplies we in the so-called “developed” world, take for granted.
continued -
Please, Peter Bournes MEDICC not political? He's a longtime leftist radical and admirer of Fidel Castro. The MEDICC website disseminates Cuban propaganda by making available flashy looking booklets citing Cuban health statistics from the Ministry of Public Health of Cuba.
As for the comment about Cuban exiles, why is it that Cuban exiles are the only victim group whose eyewitness stories are discounted? If you want to know about South African apartheid, you talk to those who lived under that system. If you want to know about the legacy of slavery, you talk to the African-American community. If you want to know about the Holocaust, you ask Holocaust survivors. However, when it comes to refugees from Communist Cuba who is cited? Fidel Castro and his sympathizers. I say if you want to know the truth about Cuban healthcare, talk to the Cubans.
Cuba is a closed society with a totalitarian government. It is exceedingly good at propaganda but exceedingly bad at health care. There is plenty of evidence of the reality. In Miami you can come across almost any drugstore and find that they proudly proclaim that they will ship medications to Cuba. Medicines are not part of the commercial embargo the US has with Cuba. Why would Cubans need relatives in America to send them medications if things are so great there. Why have two million people escaped Cuba if the quality of life is so great there?
It is a fact that Cuba has not allowed independent NGOs to monitor such things as the actual state of healthcare and human rights.
Cuban doctors arrive on US shores every day. It would be very easy for you to talk to them and find out for yourself what is going on in Cuba.
Your contempt for 2 million refugees from oppression is obvious. You'd rather believe an unelected thug of a dictator who has remained in power for 5 decades through the use of fear and intimidation than the eye witnesses to the Cuban tragedy.
ABC news has set itself apart from the pack in the mainstream media by reporting THE TRUTH ABOUT CUBA.
ABC News and John Stossel should be applauded. Not only that, they should go even deeper to expose the other myths about Cuba. They should show how foreign companies comply with unfair labor practices and exploit workers. They should show how educated women have to sell their bodies to foreigners to make ends meet. They should show what Cubans must subsist on because the state does not allow private enterprise. They should show the political prisoners and the dissidents like Dr. Darsi Ferrer and Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet. They will tell you the truth about Cuba.
When the regime falls (and it inevitably will) there will be a day reckoning. And you sir will go down as as enabler.
The ABC 20/20 segment about Cuba showed, for the first time on national television, the truth about Cuba's apartheid health care system. It showed the difference between the health care that foreigners and tourist who pay the regime in euros or American and Canadian dollars receive and the health care for regular Cubans who are not allowed at these health care facilities that are for the exclusive use of foreigners and high officials of the Cuban regime.
It also showed that Michael Moore was not telling the truth when he said that his guests received the same health care that regular Cubans receive.
These groups and individuals are upset because ABC showed the reality of Cuba's health care for regular Cubans, because when programs like these are aired it makes it more difficult for anyone to believe the lies that they have been telling the American people for so long.
I say bravo for 20/20 for having the guts to show the truth that groups like MEDICC want to keep hiding. My only complaint is that it was way too short.
The deniers are out in force today.
Stossel is a shill plain and simple.
He isn't bothered by facts in the least.