Michele Bachmann, Heath Care, Cuba & Chickens
Graham Sowa
HAVANA TIMES, Feb. 20 — United States Congressional Representative (and former Presidential Candidate of the Republic Party) Michele Bachmann said that the Federal Government should decrease its involvement in healthcare.
When asked how poor people would get medical care she said those patients who don’t have money will be taken care of by sympathetic doctors who will accept payments in commodities, such as chickens.
Representative Bachmann might be surprised to know that this solution to doctors pay already exists, and it exists far away from her version of a world where the Federal Government has no responsibility to provide for healthcare. It exists in Cuba.
As far as I can tell just about everyone who works for the government in Cuba gets a salary. This includes doctors. Monthly take home pay depends on education and job responsibilities.
Some workers might make a couple hundred pesos in pesos cubanos ($10 usd) and others make closer to 600 or 700 pesos ($30-35 usd).
Some people might assume that living in Communism means that everyone has to earn the same amount of money, but that is not the case. But at the same time the income gap that does exist is still a smaller percentage than that of the United States.
Even though the official pay scale is more egalitarian than competitive there still exist “unofficial” market forces that make some jobs much more preferable than others.
Since doctors in Cuba don’t work directly with money, and rarely with tourists that bring in hard currency, they have scarce opportunities to make a little extra on the side that gets them by each month.
In place of money gifts from patients to doctors have becomes popular. I suppose sometimes these are given as a genuine expression of thanks and sometimes with expectations of getting through the bureaucratic pipeline quicker than the other patients waiting in the same line.
I’ve mostly seen food items and homemade goods given as gifts. But it is not difficult to imagine that as one climbs the healthcare ladder toward the in-demand specialists and complicated laboratory tests that gift giving becomes a bit more elaborate.
So there is the problem with Representative Bachmann’s healthcare solution for poor people: a chicken will only get you so far.
So maybe instead of abandoning the very significant Federal Government involvement in healthcare in the United States we should focus on how to make the money we spend work more efficiently.
One area we need to start at is the anomaly almost unique to medicine when compared to all other jobs in the United States.
That is that the doctors who do procedures usually get more money than those who diagnose problems or prevent those problems in the first place. In short: they cost a lot.
In most other professions the people that diagnose the problem get paid a premium over people who turn the wrenches to fix the problem. I’m thinking of engineers called in to solve a problem on a production line, technicians reading problem reports from complicated software that monitor jet engines, and outside consultants that review business models. But in medicine it is the other way around. The people that diagnose the problem earn far less.
So a place to start making government involvement more efficient in healthcare in the United States would be to put more surgeons who are working for Government paid heath care plans or Medicare/Medicaid clients on a fixed income. Maybe even throw in incentives for finding ways to get the same healthcare results with fewer procedures.
Some of the most successful non-profit healthcare groups in the United States already keep most of their doctors on a salary and rarely pay by procedure. The Cleveland Clinic and Intermountain Healthcare have millions of patient visits a year and are routinely held up as some of the few relatively successful models of patient care coming out of the United States.
Some doctors are even becoming more accepting of the salary based payment system and are losing their fear to point out that their procedure paid collogues are making healthcare in the United States less efficient.
I have especially enjoyed Abraham Vergese’s literary commentary in his novels about the disparity surrounding diagnostician vs. procedural doctors pay and the vast amounts of resources consumed by the latter.
In the United States, where we are quickly realizing our medical industrial complex is unsustainable, we should reallocate resources from procedural pay and towards good diagnostics.
It might even meet some Republican demands, such as Representative Bachmann’s call to decrease the amount of money the Federal Government spends on healthcare.
i got Mrs. Bachmann’s comment confused. she made the Kia car analogy. http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/09/20/323168/bachmanns-solution-to-reducing-health-costs-everyone-should-buy-strip-down-kia-health-care-plans/?mobile=nc
@CL Absolutely right, that was Sue Lowden who made the chickens comment. My apologies to Mrs. Bachmann.
Well said, thank you!
NOT Michele Bachmann — Sue Lowden made the “chicken for health care” comment.
Michele Bachmann rarely speaks without offending the intelligence of any child above the age of 9. That said, however, Ms. Bachmann was not the source of the pathetically ridiculous “pay your physician with a chicken” comment.
The right-wing politician who made the pay with chickens comment was Sue Lowden. Ms. Lowden is (was?) a politician who is equally ignorant regarding issues of health care access as the clueless Michele Bachmann.
Ms. Lowden was the frightfully incompetent and unsuccessful candidate for U.S. Senate in Nevada in 2010.
see e.g., http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/04/health-care_reform_0
(appearing on a local news program, Ms Lowden suggested “offering goods or services in kind. Chickens, to be specific.” . . .
“Ms Lowden wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and . . . suggested alternative ways for people to pay for medical care: save up to $20,000 in a medical savings account, or ‘barter with your doctor'” with chickens ).
Doctors in the United States, for fear of malpractice claims, order extensive tests to justify diagnoses. I contend the devil in the details are the costs associated with avoiding and oftentimes defending against costly litigation. Because Cuba does not have torts Doctors tend to “wing it” more often and this is often to the peril of the patient. The gratuities that Cubans are pressured to pay doctors is not out of appreciation. If they don’t pay the 5 cuc or the 4 libras of sugar, their wait for an appointment takes weeks if not months. Their tests analyses will somehow get lost and their “face time’ with the doctor is reduced to seconds. Did I mention that most Cubans seldom see Cuban doctors? They usually are attended by foreign medical students like Graham because a large number of Cuban doctors are “on mission” abroad. There is no defending the every increasing inequality that exists in society in the US and in other “first world” countries for the average citizen. But if I would not trade these less than perfect circumstances, for the political oppression, food shortages, blackouts, and limited opportunities that the average Cuban citizen has to deal with every day.
The United States is a totalitarian system run by the monied people who bribe the elected officials with campaign funding and they don’t care about the people of the United States .
The number one priority of the United States is the profits of the .0001% who own most of the wealth .
” The business of the United States is business ” and the interests and welfare of the poor and working classes are a far distant priority .
Further for you or anyone to compare Cuba which is a developing country with the United States which is the richest capitalist country in the world makes absolutely no sense.
Try comparing (state) socialist Cuba with most developing CAPITALIST countries that have about the same resources and then you’re talking platanos y platanos.
Lastly, and this may come as a surprise to you and many other critics of Cuba , the United States , the richest country in the world and the mightiest military force to have ever existed has been waging an economic and propaganda ,war against Cuba for 50 (FIFTY) years .
This war has cost Cuba upwards of 80 billion dollars in those 50 years.
Cuba is the only country with a people brave enough, tough enough to be able to survive such an onslaught and the only people smart enough to know that they’re correct in holding on until the effects of the bloquero can be negated. ( in about five years in my opinion.).
Graham, I absolutely don’t agree with you! I think Cuba and United states are not in the same point of comparison, you are comparing apples and plantains.
Cuba is a totalitarian regime, whose citizens are not the government’s number one priority. Cuba government has a double moral and double currency system, and the Cuban health industry is just the same way. You are a international student, and have so many privileges that ordinary Cubans never had.
The fact that doctors accept goods from patients in exchange for medicines for a critical ill patient or a faster service means that Cuba’s so called medical potency is a false propaganda.
Again, I ask you. Please take a few days of your busy life and go to a rural little forgotten town in the provinces of Villa Clara, Matanzas, etc. and write about Cuban health systems, and the people life’s there, I will be glad to read and comment about your experience.