Wanting to be Fooled

Fred Thompson at AEI wrote this essay concerning Cuban health care. It seems that Michael Moore is escorting ill poor to this socialist island for free health care, criticizing America's lack of a similar system.

Defenders of Moore will probably point to Cuba's medical meccas like those seen in Die Another Day, implying that these are somehow standard for everyone. Students of socialism know better: companies often have staging facilities for media purposes and the bureaucratic elite. (The USSR often manufactured grocery stores filled with food and maintained to the press that these were the Soviet standard.) In Cuba, medicine is no different. Thompson writes "Castro keeps 'show' clinics equipped with the best medicines and technologies available. It was almost certainly one of these that Moore went to, if the stories in the New York Post and the New York Daily News are true."

Only the sickest of us like to see others suffer, which is why free health care is so tempting. But don't be so drawn into the possibility of the perfect that you get lost in the romance of the ruse.