Insights world, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but amazingly, too, in European countries such as Italy. As it does elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America, Cuba continues to send medical professionals to Africa – over 50,000 Cuban doctors world-wide including in 32 African countries. When we launched our armed struggle in the 1960s there was a popular song we composed to a calypso beat, “Take the country the Castro way!” By the time freedom and independence came through bloody struggles, we came to realise so much more about the examples Cuba provided in people’s living conditions, health care and education, housing and social welfare, overcoming colonial backwardness and inequalities, the provision of security for the people and defence of the revolution. In the enormous global struggle against imperialist domination, exploita-
tion and racism; military aggression and counter-revolutionary regime-change; capitalism’s gargantuan divide between wealth for the privileged few and crushing poverty for billions; horrific diseases such as Covid-19 in the wake of environmental peril; those words, “Take the country the Castro way”, are alive in our hearts. The song inspires hope, motivates united action, signposts Fidel’s immortal teachings and vision of the future. We salute Fidel this August 13, the 94th anniversary of his birth. Fidel will live on in Africa, as everywhere else, as an everlasting icon of liberation in all its forms. CT Ronnie Kasrils is a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle. He was chief of military intelligence in the ANC’s armed wing, a former government minister (1994-2008) and is the author of several books on the liberation struggle.
Sam Pizzigati
The risks and rewards of US healthcare
H
ow’s pandemic life been going for you? If you work in America’s health care industry, that depends. That totally depends. If you happen to provide health care services to actual
Covid-19 patients – as a nurse or a doctor, an orderly or a physician’s assistant – this has been the year from hell. Amid the worst worldwide pandemic in over a century, you’ve been working long, intense, chaotic hours. You’ve watched patients die at rates
8 ColdType | Mid-August 2020 | www.coldtype.net
unimaginable just six months ago. You’ve watched colleagues die. You’ve worried that you may be bringing death home to your families. If you work in health care but don’t interact with pandemic patients, the months since March haven’t exactly been easy street either. In April alone, 1.4-million health care workers lost their jobs, as virus-free Americans delayed and cancelled appointments and elective procedures. If, on the other hand, you swivel your day away in a corporate health care executive suite, these difficult and horrific months of Covid-19 have been among the most rewarding – financially – you’ve ever seen. The “vast majority” of health care companies, Axios reports, “are reporting profits that many people assumed would not have been possible as the pandemic raged on”. Health insurers are leading the way, enjoying earnings, as a New York Times analysis puts it, “double what they were a year ago”. UnitedHealth, for instance, registered $6.7-billion in 2020 second-quarter profits, up from $3.4-billion in last year’s second quarter. What explains this huge insurance industry profit spike? The simple story: Insurers like UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Anthem are continuing to collect their regular premiums from the Americans they insure, but they’re paying out far less – as the pandemic rages on – for claims on normal maladies. Now the Affordable Care
