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Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

nytimes.com

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Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#191

Post by alexanderstears »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #133
microcolonel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're in it to have a good life. To some extent that enjoyment can come from serving patients, but they would also like to have a good life at home. Is it so much to ask that people who spend all day saving and improving lives (yes, for pay) should be paid pretty well relative to the supply? In any walk of life in a capital system, your pay is determined by how you serve people. Doctors serve the very basis of thei…

I think everyone working an honest job should be payed pretty well (not sure what you mean about 'relative to the supply'), at least enough to have a good life, for sure. Is it too much to ask that everyone have enough to live a good life? Who doesn't deserve a good life because of their occupation? Nobody. I don't know there's any reason doctors should get exceptionally high incomes (except that in the U.S. they hav…

>Is it too much to ask that everyone have enough to live a good life?

Depends on 'the good life' - we can't lift everyone up to live like a doctor, but it's easy to push doctors down so they live like everyone else.

>I don't know there's any reason doctors should get exceptionally high incomes

U.S doctor's incomes are probably influenced by the AMA cartel that keeps good candidates from earning medical degrees. After we bust the cartel, we can let the chips fall where they may. My hunch is that doctors would be paid more like veterinarians if the market were freer.

On some level, a job's compensation is tied to the challenge of the job. It's more difficult to perform good medicine than it is to be a cashier, we should expect doctors to be better compensated than cashiers.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#192

Post by loco5niner »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #4

You know I can't really feel their plight. Take this: >Hundreds of miles away, in Minas Gerais State, Dr. Jiménez, 34, found the work rewarding, but also began to harbor feelings of resentment. “You are trained in Cuba and our education is free, health care is free, but at what price?” she said. “You wind up paying for it your whole life.” Is that not the point? The communist government allows anybody to attend their…

> a country which is explicitly organized around giving everybody a chance to succeed

Are we talking about the same Cuba?

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#193

Post by huac »

jules wrote: post #163
huac wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the percentage of non-defense GDP spending? I'd guess that the delta is larger.

The US spends 3.3% of GDP on military whereas France spends 2.3%, so while excluding this makes the delta larger, it won't make a significant dent.

Fair, though France's military spending is the highest in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...).

My understanding is that US spending is relatively 'inefficient' compared to European countries, esp for healthcare. We spend more for comparatively worse outcomes (this is definitely true when compared to UK NHS, probably for France too).

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#194

Post by turk184 »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #4

You know I can't really feel their plight. Take this: >Hundreds of miles away, in Minas Gerais State, Dr. Jiménez, 34, found the work rewarding, but also began to harbor feelings of resentment. “You are trained in Cuba and our education is free, health care is free, but at what price?” she said. “You wind up paying for it your whole life.” Is that not the point? The communist government allows anybody to attend their…

I don't think you and I agree on what "free" means.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#195

Post by turk184 »

panarky wrote: post #60
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #4

You know I can't really feel their plight. Take this: >Hundreds of miles away, in Minas Gerais State, Dr. Jiménez, 34, found the work rewarding, but also began to harbor feelings of resentment. “You are trained in Cuba and our education is free, health care is free, but at what price?” she said. “You wind up paying for it your whole life.” Is that not the point? The communist government allows anybody to attend their…

Earlier this year I visited Cuba and rented a room from cardiologist and his family. He explained that the results of the Cuban system are mixed. On the one hand, literacy and life expectancy are way up since the revolution. On the other hand, cardiologists need to rent rooms to people like me to afford their simple life. He recognized the deficiencies of their system, but he thought they were outweighed by the benef…

But he thought wrong. There is absolutely no comparison in the standard of living in Cuba to the western world. None whatsoever. Cast whatever aspersions you like about it, the fact remains.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#196

Post by [deleted] »

nslav wrote: post #45
Klockan wrote: post #19

> The pastor was outraged to learn that, under the terms of their employment, Cuban doctors earn only about a quarter of the amount the Brazilian government pays Cuba for their services. This is how Sweden finances their free education as well, it is called taxes. The problem isn't with how Cuba treats specifically doctors but how Cuba refuses to let people emigrate in general.

Yes that confused me a bit as well... I work for a US-based engineering company and they bill clients 3 - 4x what I earn for my work. Am I misunderstanding something about the article?

[deleted]

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#197

Post by Can_Not »

microcolonel wrote: post #190
Can_Not wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Cubans would rather have a better basic quality of life They do have a better basic quality of life. That's exactly what they already have. Cuba is not a rich country like the US, so of course the direct comparison without historical context will mislead you. If they opened up free capitalism style trade with other nations, they would be slaves on foreign owned farms and foreign owned factories instead of t…

> You're suggesting that they're poor because they're communist. That's not the case. I'd like you to back that up. Right now, the private sector in Cuba (for example, taxi drivers with private licenses) is rich by Cuban standards. A taxi driver with a private license can make several times more in a day than a doctor makes in a month. Participation in the black market also contributes to quality of life. The most su…

I don't disagree that rational citizen actors are making themselves more money in those specific scenarios. But that doesn't mean capitalism is increasing the nation's net capital and wealth in any way communism could not have. It doesn't mean those actors are not increasing wealth inequality (some could be, maybe it's negligible, maybe it's even decreasing). Fixing one's own microeconomics isn't equivalent to fixing the entire nation's macroeconomics. If the nation has a small total value, it's not going to increase total value size if you yourself take a bigger peice of the pie.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#198

Post by WaxProlix »

wooter wrote: post #130
asdfjklasdfjkl wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more nuanced critiques of either of the predominant systems discussed in this comment section. If you want to throw unfair death totals for what are at best regimes loosely approximating their underlying communist or capitalist ideologies, you can just as easily claim capitalism kills tons. https://i.redd.it/h0l4hqcf5inz.jpg but honestly, I don't think body counts are the right way to judge either. Makes fo…

none of those things have to do with capitalism. those were all acts of government and the antithesis of free enterprise.

I have to believe this is a troll comment but maybe Poe's gotten the best of me again...

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#199

Post by dang »

tmccrmck wrote: post #188
dang wrote: post #165

All: Generic discussions about communism and other grand ideological themes are off topic here. Because we're communists? No, because there's nothing new to say about them, at least not on an internet forum—if you've really found some, you should write a book. As a topic gets bigger and bigger, what one can say gets less meaningful. We end up in the space of 'what's new is not good and what's good is not new', and th…

Perhaps we should revisit the idea of a political detox? I for one have been noticing the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year. Discussions have become less about the content of the article and more about the title or some other related fact. Technical discussions are becoming increasingly derailed by bike-shedding, ideology, and flame wars. Hell, I bet even the average word count per comm…

That didn't work, because the question of how to define 'political' is itself highly political. We knew that before we tried the detox experiment but boy did we know it afterwards. And it wouldn't be in HN's mandate (like, not at all) to try to limit it to technical stories. Our core audience, even if it feels like a minority sometimes, is readers who are interested in both technical and non-technical things.

> the signal-to-noise ratio on HN has been lowering over the past year

People have been saying that since the beginning. Is it true? Maybe, but there are strong biases (e.g. it always feels like things are getting worse) and it's hard to measure.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#200

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

ameister14 wrote: post #181
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Succeed at what? What success do they gain from being a doctor in a country which prevents them from being rewarded for it? I would say the success of being a doctor at all but it seems that to you success is purely a function of wealth. In that case these people could have left Cuba before using it's free education. It's highly hypocritical to use all the benefits of the Cuban system and then be upset when you also…

>I understand you don't like communism but really the hyperbole man... and shame on you for trivializing slavery. These doctors all knew what the Cuban system was, they chose to use Cuba's excellent medical education program which is provided for free and which can only be provided, again, for free because it taxes it's citizens heavily and now that they have received that benefit, want to rescind on it's price. It's…

>It's pretty clear by that statement that you don't understand the government of Cuba or how it has been funded.

Fair, fair, it's communist not tax-capitalist. I shouldn't have said "tax."

>Ok, so 75% of medical students come from families in the top 50% of incomes. That doesn't seem too absurd to me.

Top 40%. It does seem absurd to me, did you look at Figure 2 that I linked? That is the inversion of a meritocracy.

>As to your Wired article, the statement that "In effect, Cuba that poor communist country is to a certain extent actually subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system that happen to be less lucrative" is a bit ridiculous, because that article mentions a total 100 doctors using the program over a 17 year period. Yes, Cuba may train 6 American MD's a year, (actually, more like 4 - not everyone graduates) but that isn't really subsidizing vital parts of our healthcare system, not in any meaningful way.

But totally true! 100 doctors here working in geographic areas that don't normally attract doctors and/or fields that don't attract doctors. It may not be super large but I bet you there are some Americans out there who are very happy (any may not even know it) that Cuba invested in our doctors when we wouldn't.

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