Thank you Cuba

Unlike our country that actively steals doctors from other countries, Cuba actually export doctors. They were even nice enough to train eight American doctors. According to the BBC report:

Their studies were fully funded by Cuba's communist government.
Under the deal, students must return to their communities in the US to offer low-cost healthcare.

The United States, on the other hand, is extremely reliant upon stealing doctors from other countries. This from a wonderful article in the International Herald Tribune:

It turns out that our gain was the developing world's loss. According to a study published in October in The New England Journal of Medicine, 25 percent of all doctors in the United States are foreign medical school graduates. A large majority - 60 percent - come from the developing world, where doctors are scarce and countries are being destroyed by AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

Why are we Americans so reliant on foreign doctors? The problem is that even as the demand for doctors has grown significantly in the United States, medical school enrollment has barely budged. The annual number of medical school graduates has remained almost constant since 1980, despite a population increase of 50 million.

Why bother training doctors when you can just steal them from another country? What's the point of having a health care system that cares more about making profits than training good doctors? Shouldn't we be training Cuban's to be doctors in Cuba? Considering the tremendous disparity in wealth, isn't it a little embarrassing?

Tehcnorati Tags: Cuba Health Care Stealing doctors

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