Left I on the News

Olympic baseball? No, medical school enrollments. Cuba, with a population of around 11 million, now has a medical school enrollment of 76,770. The U.S., with a population of just under 300 million, has a medical school enrollment of 67,656.

Indeed, per capita, the free medical education which Cuba makes available to students from other countries (including the U.S.), which now totals more than 10,600, exceeds the number of students receiving an extremely costly medical education in the United States by a factor of four.

And those students are being put to good use! More than 13,000 Cuban doctors have worked in Venezuela over the last two years, providing medical care to the poorest of the poor, as they have in country after country for decades; indeed, it's a fairly well-known fact that Cuba has more doctors serving abroad than the World Health Organization.

And, of course, the "inefficient" socialist system of Cuba provides these medical benefits to its own people and people around the world for far less cost per capita than the marvelously "efficient" capitalist system at work elsewhere. Of course when you don't have HMOs, insurance companies, private hospitals, doctors, and drug companies taking billions of dollars of profits out of the system (and hence out of the pie available for actual health care), it's easy.

People before profits - it's more than just a slogan. It's a reality.