Research and Development. Americans spend the money developing drugs, techniques, procedures and new machines. It happens here because it is profitable. It isn't profitable anywhere else. You socialize our medical system and new medical advances will slow or disappear....
BBC NEWS | Business | Cuba sells its medical expertise
"Cuba sells its medical expertise
By Tom Fawthrop
reporting from Havana, Cuba
Cuba's struggling economy has been boosted by the successful export of its medical technology abroad...
Its low material living standards and crisis-ridden economy leads to a low per capita income, but President Fidel Castro's Caribbean blend of socialism has developed a public health system that places Cuba in another league altogether on human development indexes.
...The export of pharmaceutical products, vaccines and biotechnology helps to pay for the growing costs of funding medical research and a free health system with comprehensive coverage.
...the medical sector ranks sixth in terms of exports and services...Out of that figure biotechnology alone accounted for more than $150m.
In the 1980s millions of dollars were invested by the Cuban government in developing modern vaccines laboratories and a massive centre for biotechnology.
The country's first breakthrough in medical research was its discovery and patenting of meningitis-B vaccine in late 1980s.
It has been successfully exported...The vaccine has now been licensed to GlaxoSmithKline who will now market it...eventually in the USA.
Cuba's attempts to gain a foothold in the international pharmaceutical market have come up against formidable obstacles (...including) the stringent (and vindictive - my comment) US trade embargo.
...During the last few years the biggest earner for Cuban biotechnology has been the export of Hepatitis-B vaccine to more than 30 countries. The Cuban vaccine is widely regarded as the more effective than Belgian and US-produced vaccines.
...Joint ventures with China, India and Russia have been established to set up vaccine plants in their countries based on a transfer of Cuban technology.
Health tourism
Another growing source of income is health tourism....Last year more than 5000 foreign patients travelled to Cuba for a wide range of treament...the unique Cuban treatment for retinitis pigmentosa, often known as night blindness, has attracted many patients...including those from North America,
The special obstacles to Cuba (i.e the vindictive US embargo - again my comments) breaking into the western market have led to a policy of trying to find joint venture partners
Cuba's cutting-edge products for neck and breast cancer have caused the biggest stir in the world of biotechnologymarket...Analysts say so far the commercial rewards for Cuba's many medical innovations have only been a fraction of their potential.
It would also be a very satisfying for Cuban scientists to feel their research and development, which is not driven by the profit motive, had been successful in the world marketplace."
And in Australia people makes $20 in a minimum wage job and it costs them $40 for a case of Coke. And no other western nation has a standard of living as high as that of the US. Spending $40k on a car here is normal. In England anything over $25k is expensive.
And in the US extreme poverty - the likes of which is never seen in the UK or Australia - is normal in parts of the country.
I used to work in a famous Jazz and soul record shop in Notting Hill in the eighties. At that time there was a burgeoning collectors market for old soul, funk and Jazz records, fuelled by the resurgence of interest in the music as a result of the rediscovery of the music by a few young pioneering DJs, such as Norman Jay and Gilles Peterson.
However at the time there was little interest in much of the old vinyl in the US. This meant that there was a huge quantity of cheap, remaindered items (cut-outs) and second hand vinyl in the US, which fetched large sums back in the UK. As a consequence there was a constant stream of dealers going to the US, scouring record shops and record company warehouses and bringing items back to the UK for large profits.
Eventually, as the bandwagon grew, the supply in the easily accessible areas dried up and the retailers in major cities cottoned on and increased their prices, which led to the dealers going to more and more obscure backwaters of the US to find stocks.
I vivdly remember people coming back and relating their amazement at some of the third-world poverty they found in some of these remote areas - people virtualy dressed in rags and the like.
What you really mean is that SOME people have a better standard of living, but that others have a much worse one. That's one of the problems of extreme inequality of wealth and opportunity (one of the other main ones being the fuelling of catastrophic asset bubbles, as we've found out to our cost).
