Cuban generosity

On Monday we went to see the documentary Salud! which had a screening on UCSB campus. The documentary takes a look at the Cuban health care system and its doctors' humanitarian effort around the world. It's interesting to compare it to the American system, which has been under attack lately, most notably by Michael Moore in his documentary Sicko. The American system has several flaws. It's a "for profit" system which means doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and anyone else making money off of treatment and medicine are more interested in a patient that can pay their bills than one who can't. It seems that most people agree that someone with no money deserves basic treatment as much as someone with a lot of money, which is in contradiction of our basic capitalist society. Not only that, but the medical industry makes money when people are sick and injured and not as much when people are healthy. As a result, there is very little focus on disease prevention. Big business in the United States has always been good at making money off people, and it's no different in the case of health care. The United States having the most expensive health care system in the world is evidence of this.

The antithesis of our system is the Cuban system. Its focus is on equal health care for all with an emphasis on prevention. And they seem to achieve more than us with much less to work with, especially when compared to the poor areas of the United States. Not only that, but Cuba has generously helped other countries that needed assistance with health care. The Cuban doctors have no problem going into a country and living amongst the poorest of the poor to give them medical services. The documentary showed Cuban doctors going into remote areas of Honduras, Venezuela and The Gambia to provide treatment to people who in some cases have never seen a doctor before. One example given is a father in Honduras who traveled every day to a new Cuban-run facility to have his son treated for a minor stomach disease. When the doctor told him that his son didn't need to come every day the father told the doctor that he had lost four other sons to this same disease and he was worried it was going to happen again. He had lost 4 sons to a disease that is easily treated and prevented, but there weren't any doctors in the area and the diseases went untreated.

The Cuban system also focuses on community health. They get to know the community they live in and visit people in their homes. There's actually a relationship between doctor and patient besides basic questions and a quick diagnosis. As the patients feel more comfortable with their doctors they are more likely to listen to them and more likely to report problems earlier when diseases are easily and inexpensively treated. Personally, I hate going to visit doctors in the United States. In my experience, they often give a diagnosis before completely listening to what the problem is. Or they try to categorize you by asking a bunch of uncomfortable seemingly unrelated questions. In the end, I feel like the doctor didn't tell me anything that I couldn't have found out easily by myself, then they prescribe some drug that I probably don't need. I guess my overall feeling is that I typically don't trust my doctor to look out for my best interest and I don't think he knows enough about me personally to make a good judgment anyway.

Why are Cubans so willing to go serve people in other countries? Are they just naturally more charitable than people of other countries? I don't think so, but I think living in a capitalist society doesn't encourage very much charitable work. I'm sure there are a lot of Americans that would love to take a two year break from their office job to go serve people in another country. But if they make that decision how will they pay their mortgage, save for retirement and make sure their kids have enough money to attend the university of their choice? As unchecked corruption continues in the White House and the rich get richer at the cost of the poor getting poorer it's time we had a major change in the United States. A change motivated by love rather than greed.

If you build it, they'll still come (Part II)

If you haven't read the first part, you can read it here. In this post I will continue to discuss the myths about illegal immigration.

The second myth: illegal immigrants are taking away jobs from US citizens. Many people that disagree with this myth would say that illegal immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans refuse to do. That argument is only partially true, because I don't believe that there's a job that Americans won't do, just a price that Americans won't do it for. Which is why many businesses not only hire illegals, but provide ways in which they can acquire fake papers and sometimes even have deals with "coyotes" (a term for those who guide illegals across the border). But the question at hand is whether or not illegal immigrants are actually taking jobs away from Americans. The way many people think about this is that there is some set number of jobs in the US, and since we already have a certain percentage of unemployed that bringing in more workers would make things worse. However, nearly all economists agree that immigrants (legal and illegal alike) create growth and more jobs than they take. Not only that, they have no adverse affect on the wages of native born citizens. Not surprisingly, Donald Huddle is about the only economist to disagree with this claim. Apparently, INS used his numbers for years despite his questionable methods:

[I]n 1981 he conducted a study by sending his graduate students out to three Houston area construction sites. The students counted the number of illegal aliens at the work sites, in part, by counting the number of workers wearing blue hats and labeling such people illegal aliens. From these numbers, Donald Huddle calculated how many Houston natives were displaced and then extrapolated this data for the entire U.S. construction industry.

Obviously, the color of a construction worker's hard hat is in no way indicative of their legal status. Blue hard hats aside, the idea that you can go to a construction site and observe which workers are legal or illegal is inaccurate and racist. And even if the numbers they collected were accurate, he used a sample of construction workers in Houston to describe the entire U.S. construction industry. In statistics, there are several acceptable forms of sampling, whether it be a simple random sample a stratified sample or a cluster sample. The basic idea is that any individual in the population has a chance of being selected. In this case, no construction site had any chance of being selected except those in Houston, which by statistical definition makes this study biased.

If you build it, they'll still come (Part I)

If you haven't heard, a lot of people want to build a wall between the US and Mexico. In Virginia, people who are frustrated with the federal government's handling of immigration are taking things into their own hands. These people don't like illegals coming into the US for several reasons. According to many of these people, illegal immigrants burden us with costs (hospital fees, schooling for their children, etc.) and don't pay taxes. They're taking jobs away from US citizens. They also burden us with high amounts of crime, they're responsible for most gang violence, and our prison system is filled with illegals. And we need to secure our border to protect ourselves against the terrorists, like the 9/11 terrorists that came across the Mexican border. However, it turns out that most of these claims are false and are nothing more than thinly veiled racism.

The first myth: illegals are costing US taxpayers billions of dollars by using our hospitals through Medicare, enrolling their kids in our schools, accepting welfare and many other things that they aren't paying for. The simple answer to this question is that they are paying for it. Illegals pay taxes just like anyone else. Some don't pay everything because they work "under the table" jobs, while others pay too much because they don't file their tax returns, even though they're legally allowed to. But with all these costs are they really paying enough in taxes to cover all the benefits they're receiving? According to Donald Huddle, an economist from Rice University, illegal immigration has a net cost (total cost minus total taxes collected from illegal immigrants) of $42.5 billion from 1970-1992, and $69 billion as recently as 1997. However, those numbers have been disputed by several sources, one of which is the Urban Institute, which published a study saying that through many errors of assumptions and calculations you can turn the $42.5 billion loss into a $29 billion surplus. The biggest of mistakes by Huddle was he did not include their Social Security taxes taken out as the taxes they were paying, which was about 15% of each of their paychecks. That alone would cut the $42.5 billion cost down to $12.5 billion. You can check out the other details of their report here.

The right-leaning (although they claim to be bi-partisan) Center for Immigration Studies has claimed that illegal aliens cost the US $10 billion, they pay $16 billion and use $26 billion in services. My first concern with this study is, since they are linked to Republican Party immigration restrictionists on Capitol Hill, how fair can their numbers be? Did they use some of the biased techniques used by Donald Huddle? Even if their study is completely fair, they admit themselves that "with nearly two-thirds of illegal aliens lacking a high school degree, the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and tax payments, not their legal status or heavy use of most social services." Which means that if they are costing us money, it's because they're poor and therefore pay less taxes, not because they're using our schools or on welfare. By the way, no illegal immigrants are on welfare. They can't get approval for that with their illegal status. If they're raising a child that is a US citizen then they can get funding for the child but not for themselves. Yet, CIS considers this $1.9 billion cost a benefit received by an illegal rather than a citizen. In fact, many of the other costs they consider are for their children that have citizenship. Even so, if we're criticizing the illegals because they cost us money, and the reason they cost us money is because they're poor, we might as well ship all of our poor people to Mexico, legal or not, Mexican or not, because they're such a drain on the government. Plus, it sounds like the legal poor are costing us a lot more than the illegal poor, because they actually know how to use the programs and are not scared of deportation.

Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer = my new hero.

I'm kind of ashamed to be getting so much enjoyment out of a story about Paris Hilton, but wow. The woman is 26 years old and she's crying and screaming for her mommy like she just got handed the death penalty.

I know, I know, this is exactly the kind of thing that's wrong with society—the media and everybody going nuts about some shallow, vapid celebrity—but is this not the greatest thing ever? Redemption for the the American justice system, at least? It brightened my day.

You're so special

So a coworker of mine was telling me how she's going to Tucson this weekend to attend one relative's high school graduation, and another relative's middle school graduation.

Wait a minute, I said. Did you just say middle school graduation?

The concept is foreign to me. Since when did leaving eighth grade count as some kind of amazing achievement? I mean, you don't even get to leave your parents' house like you do when you graduate from high school, or get to have your own place like you do when you graduate from college. You just get to move from one school building to another one across the street. No one should get a diploma for that.

Sure, it's great to encourage your kids and help them build confidence...but middle school graduation? It's things like this that contribute to the whole culture of praise, entitlement, and inflated self-worth that surrounds kids these days. They also deserve to eat peanut butter whenever they want and send text messages to their friends whenever they want. What's next? Here's a reward for getting out of bed in the morning?

It's like that cell phone commerical I hate—the one with the mom who has to dress up like a taco for a job she clearly despises so her lazy kids can keep on sending dozens of text messages every day? Don't worry, kids, instead of taking away your cell phones or asking you to contribute to the cell phone bill every month, we'll just sign up for this new plan that will add an extra $50 to an already hefty expense. Give me a break.

Stepford, the sequel

Today's most-emailed article in the New York Times:

For Girls, It's Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too

First, a correction issued from the paper:

A front-page article on Sunday about the experiences of high-achieving high school girls in Newton, Mass., misstated a verb property of Latin, which one of the girls in the article studies. It is the subjunctive mood; there is no subjunctive "tense."

Ok, I couldn't tell you that, and I took five years of Latin in high school plus two semesters in college.

Now on to the real article:

Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns). Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do. . . .

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see . . . these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”

“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.

If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything.

So there's the universal problem of feeling like you don't measure up no matter how well you do. And then there's the problem of hyper-competitive societies that are so intent on churning out smart, beautiful, athletic, charitable robots that it doesn't matter if they believe in or care about anything they do, as long as it looks good on a college application.

Oh, and then on the other side of the coin are all the less-advantaged kids who don't have the benefit of SAT prep or the luxury of schools that can afford the AP classes and the extracurriculars.

But here's what gets me: nearly 50 years after the emergence of second wave feminism and the strides made by women in the workplace and education, girls are still expected to be perfect. Sure, you can be yourself and have fun, but if you want to get anywhere in life, you'd better be flawless. Have we really only gotten this far?

My head hurts.