Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe; Part Five

     Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians - Part Five.

        Clayton Sorich's paper on Soviet medicare would have left people thinking that the Soviet medicare system was totally bad and should never be copied anywhere. Yet this is really a half truth. While Clayton was exposing the bad points of the Soviet system, the U.S. medicare system had its flaws too.
    By the 1990's, the United States was the only country in the western world where many of its citizens weren't part of any medicare plan. One in six Americans in fact, didn't belong to any medicare plan. As a result, over 90,000 Americans went bankrupt every year from medicare bills. More than  20,000 Americans died every year from lack of medical care.
    U.S. President Barack Obama's Affordable Health Care Act was supposed to solve these problems. In 2009 Obama made a promise. "We need," he told the American Medical Association, " a comprehensive reform that covers everyone. It will provide affordable health insurance to every single American."
    Yet Obama's promise never came true. 20 million Americans signed up for what's now called 'Obamacare'. Still, 30 million Americans or one in ten citizens, have no medical coverage. And medical costs in the U.S. just keep on rising.
   Meanwhile in Africa, and parts of Asia and Latin America some people have no medical care at all. As Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn point out in their book 'Half The Sky' over half a million women died every year from pregnancy. More than 5 million women are permamently injured from having babies. In these poor countries where over 2 billion people live, a Soviet style medicare system would save the lives of millions of women and men too.
    Clayton's anti-communism has blinded him to the positive side of some parts of communism.
     Now nearly 30years later, the Soviet system has vanished. So has Yugoslavia and the East German Democratic Republic In Europe and Russia, socialism is history where once it ruled. Yet inadequate or non-existent medicare is a fact of life in large parts of the world.
    Clayton, Milan and Maria Sorich and the rest of their family are right to condemn communist tyranny. Yet they are wrong to ignore a few of the benefits that communism brought to the Soviet Union and parts of Eastern Europe. And one big benefit was government run medicare. It's still needed in parts of the world including parts of the U.S. of A.