A whirlwind tour through the exciting landscape opening up around digital wireless communication
In The Brave New Unwired World, the CEO of one of today's hottest wireless businesses explores the latest thinking and trends in the exciting world of digital wireless communication and boldly predicts the future of this hot new field.
I’m often baffled by the Wall Street Journal, which seems to cherry pick which aspects of free trade and capitalism it wants to promote, and where to promote them. I find it odd, and typical of MSM, that it ignores the point that Cuba has been embargoed by the US, and the US government has used every trick and threat in its arsenal to keep any medication or medical equipment or medical devices out of the hands of Cuban doctors. If you are going to question Cuban capabilities, then a more fair test would be: if American doctors could not use any American, European, or Japanese drugs, scanners, equipment, or devices, nor access Indian or other nations via broadband networks, what would their track record be? Deaths from medical mistakes, including iatrogenic (doctor-caused) illnesses and injuries in the US are over 120,000 a year, more than twice as many as die in auto accidents. You’d think after reading this article that Americans would have much better health and longevity stats, wouldn’t yet? But they don’t – the average lifespan is 77 in both nations. However, Michelle Obama was just saying yesterday that the next generation is going to have shorter lifespans than their parents, while there is no such evidence from Cuba.
Saying Cuban doctors have to practice as nurses omits the question: is Cuba the only country about which this is true? The AMA sets the parameters so there are only 16,000 new doctors created by American medical schools annually. They don’t want the supply of doctors to go up, so they artificially constrain supply by creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about doctors from other nations. As a person who has done business in the Philippines, I can confirm that Philippine doctors know that they won’t even get visas if they say they are doctors, so they lie and say they are nurses…and have no problem getting visas. In other words, the US government participates in a scam to pretend that dirty stupid foreign doctors are usually incapable of meeting the lofty American standards. And yet…there are many more doctors who smoke cigarettes and marijuana, drink alcohol or are alcoholics, take illegal drugs, get sued for medical malpractice, perform excessive or unnecessary or cosmetic surgery, and make lethal medical mistakes in the US as a percentage than there are in Cuba.
And for all the implied boasting of America’s superiority over Cuba’s health care, there is the funny matter of the cost – $7,000/person/year in the US (jumping to $15,000 from age 65 and increasing exponentially from there), vs. $200 in Cuba…for the same longevity and roughly the same health standards.
The worst omission to me, however, is the fact that Cuba does have treatments that the US does not have. I stand for free trade. I wish Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ had the balls to do so as well. WSJ should be asking for the embargo to be lifted so US citizens could have what the billions of people who live in China, India, and Russia have – inexpensive effective drugs from Cuba. However, WSJ is about politics, not really about business, so I won’t hold my breath that WSJ will be capitalist any sooner than Cuba will be.
