Free Healthcare!

Powerline today references a story with pictures on Babalu Blog about Cuba's "free" healthcare system. (To which the obvious rejoinder is: "you get what you pay for".) Some will point out that pictures can be misleading - particularly when we're talking about just three tight shots, selected to tell a particular story. But denying or marginalizing them begs the opposite bias.

In reading what after three pages seems to be the worst and most outrageous kind of apologist-for-tyranny book, ("North Korea: Another Country" - the title of which speaks volumes about the moral-relativism-as-religion bias of the author), I encountered a similar reference to "free" healthcare as a benefit of living under brutal repression:

An internal CIA study almost grudgingly acknowledged various achievements of [the Kim] regime: compassionate care for children in general and war orphans in particular; "radical change" in the position of women; genuinely free housing, free health care, and preventive medicine; and infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the most advanced countries until the recent famine.

I don't have the time to fisk this one reprehensible sentence right now, but it contains enough deliberate moral blindness and bias to fill another long post. Watch this space for that. What's remarkable is the similarity of the bogus arguments that continue to be applied to Communism: it's just another way, it has some benefits that are worth the (heavily downplayed) costs, the U.S. has its own problems, etc. With my brother in the hospital for chemo right now, I can say with some conviction that the idea of sending him to Cuba or North Korea for care didn't really cross my mind.