What Is The Difference Between Cuba And Us Healthcare

Cuba and the United States represent opposite ends of the healthcare spectrum. Cuba has a completely state run healthcare system, where treatment is free and the idea of paying for a doctor’s visit is strange. The system is organized to emphasize community involvement and care; each area of the country has a polyclinic that provides many of the necessary primary care specialists, and within that polyclinic system, doctor and nurse teams take even more responsibility for those around them by living among their patients and ensuring that each family receives a check up at least once a year. These services, along with other key measures, such as immunization, are compulsory, and are part of the contract between the government and its citizens—if
While Cuba and the United States have similar life expectancies, 79.3 in America and 79.1 in Cuba, Cuba has a significant advantage in several key categories (“Life expectancy”). The island has a lower child mortality rate than the United States, at 4.40 per 1,000 live births compared to 5.8, and many more doctors at its disposal than the U.S., at 7.519 physicians per 1000 people versus 2.568 doctors (“Infant Mortality Rate” ; “Density of physicians”). In fact, Cuba’s healthcare system generates so many doctors that they have “over 35,000 medical workers serving in more than 70 countries providing care for some 70 million people” (Keck and Reed e18). These facts are particularly surprising when considering the difference in how much each country spends on healthcare. According to the World Bank, in 2014, America spent 17.1% of its GDP on healthcare, or $9,403 per person, and Cuba spent 11.1% of its GDP, which is $817 per capita (“Health expenditure, total” ; “Health expenditure per capita”). Considering how much money is spent per capita on healthcare in the United States, it is particularly alarming that the 2010 census found that Americans were visiting their primary physicians less frequently “working-age adults made an average of 3.9 visits to doctors, nurses or other medical providers, down from 4.8 in 2001,” and that, “in 2010, 21 percent of uninsured adults in poor health received
The United States’ innovation in basic medical sciences, which focuses on “our understanding of the human body and of diseases,” is best shown by the number of Nobel Prizes in Medicine and Physiology the country has won compared to rest of the world, “of the 95 recipients in the past 40 years, 57 (60 percent) were from the United States” (Raad and Whitman 4,5). The United States’ privatized system encourages significant investment in scientific research and risky new ideas, which are often the source of fundamental medical discoveries. In terms of diagnostic and therapeutic technology, the United States claims responsibility for 9 of the top 10 most innovations and 20 of the top 27 most important innovations as chosen by a widely-known and cited study by Stanford economics professor Victor Fuchs and Dartmouth professor of medicine Harold Sox (Raad and Whitman 6). Technologies contributed by the United States include MRI and CT Scanning and ACE inhibitors. American dominance is similarly evident in pharmaceutical innovations since 1968, where the United States has been the research center responsible for 16 of the top 29 pharmaceutical innovations, including drugs such as Prozac and Capoten (Raad and Whitman 13). While Cuba has managed to develop