Apparently Gywnny’s dissing her heritage

But the question remains: was Gwyneth Paltrow on to something when she noted (or didn’t) that “the British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans,” and that “people here don’t talk about work and money; they talk about interesting things at dinner”? Whether Britons are objectively cleverer and more amusing than Americans, or whether they just sound that way, is one of the deep mysteries of British life for expatriates like Ms. Paltrow, who lives in London with her husband, the British rock star Chris Martin, and their children, Apple and Moses.

Of course I have my own opinions and can legitimately talk out of both sides of my mouth on this one. But then again, I can introduce you to some extremely uncivilized and unintelligent citizens of both nations!

Man changes sex, parents sue hospital

A couple whose only son underwent a sex change operation has sued a hospital for compensation and to have the surgery reversed because their “family line” was broken, a Chinese newspaper reported.The Yancheng Evening News said the parents and relatives of a person whose name the newspaper gave as Xie Xiaoxin also became violent and occupied a ward at the hospital for 11 days in September in an attempt to get US$3.6 million in compensation and their son’s gender changed again.

I guess there’s also some issues around who exactly gets to consent to "informed" consent!

Just to prove that a) I’m not biased one way or the other, and b) that everyone has problems. In Canada a new study says that a shortage of family doctors contributes to long wait times.

Here’s a long and interesting article on Cuban Medical Diplomacy. Essentially Castro has been exporting doctors all over the place, and now Chavez is using Venezuela’s oil money to pay for it. I was reading along wondering why we hadn’t imported a few Cuban MDs to handle the US inner cities when I discovered that apparently they offered to send 1,000 to Louisiana after Katrina, but were turned down.

The article is pretty favorable, even though it’s clear that the export of doctors and concentration on the medical care system is at least partly a propaganda stunt by the Cuban government. A couple of things worth noting, though.

First, sending doctors overseas to help other poor people may be worthy and all that (and has the positive benefits of upsetting foreign medical associations, as it’s done in Venezuela) but it doesn’t mean that human rights within Cuba are respected any more than there were during the Cold war. And sometimes the lack of human rights compounds the medical problems there. For example a colleague of mine’s daughter went to Cuba  to do a medical mission/training and met and married a Cuban doctor while there. That doctor was not allowed to leave with her to go to the US, and when he formally applied to do so, was fired from his job, and no longer allowed to practice. Thankfully he escaped by sea, after several, several terrifying attempts. But there is no justification for refusing to allow people to leave a country; and in this case it caused his medical training to be wasted.

Second, and this is my cynical side talking—isn’t excessive spending on health care something that only rich country like ours can afford? What has a poor country like Cuba gone without to provide doctors for the rest of the developing world?

I spent rather more than I’d like of my Thursday night writing a piece I promised ABCNews for their week-long series on the health care system that starts Sunday. As I was finishing up I saw this. It’s not exactly what I was writing about, but it’s not far away—Medical costs push 78 million Asians into poverty

International health experts have estimated that 78 million more Asians than previously thought are living in poverty because of healthcare costs. Many people in Asian countries do not have health insurance and pay for doctor bills and medical treatments. But the out-of-pocket health expenses they incur are not included in conventional estimates of poverty.When researchers deducted the medical costs from total household resources in 11 Asian countries, millions more people fell below the internationally accepted poverty threshold of $1 per head per day. "If you allow for direct out-of-pocket healthcare payments, there are another 78 million counted as poor," said Dr Eddy van Doorslaer, a health economist at Erasmus University in the Netherlands who headed the research team."We calculated that an additional 2.7 percent of the population under study ended up with less than $1 a per day after they had paid for healthcare." The figures, which are reported in the Lancet medical journal on Friday, are based on information from national expenditure surveys of what people spend on medical care in the various countries. The researchers extrapolated the national, representative samples to cover the entire population. Overall the study showed the prevalence of poverty was 14 percent higher than other estimates that did not include out-of-pocket healthcare costs.

Just wait till Heritage/Manhattan/Cato find out about this!