JUN 8, 2015 @ 04:34 PM
Cuba's Most Valuable Export: Its Healthcare Expertise
Bill Frist , CONTRIBUTOR
When you think of Cuban exports, you might think of sugar, or perhaps its famously sought-after cigars. But one of the nation’s most profitable exports is actually its own healthcare professionals.
The Cuban government reportedly earns $8 billion a year in revenues from professional services carried out by its doctors and nurses, with some 37,000 Cuban nationals currently working in 77 countries. The socialist regime allows the government to collect a portion of the incomes earned by Cuban workers abroad.
For example, in 2013 Cuba inked a deal with the Brazilian Health Ministry to send 4,000 Cuban doctors to underserved regions of Brazil by the end of the year – worth as much as $270 million a year to the Castro government. By the end of 2014, Brazil’s Mais Medicos program, meaning “More Doctors,” had brought in 14,462 health professionals – 11,429 of which came from Cuba.
Over the past 50 years, Cuba consistently used the export of its doctors as a powerful and far-reaching tool of health diplomacy. The island nation has built good will and improved its global standing with emerging countries around the world during its years of isolation. It sent its first doctors overseas as far back as 1963, and to date has sent physicians to over 100 countries.
In my travels doing medical mission work to underserved regions in over a dozen African nations, the most common nonindigenous health personnel I run across are doctors and nurses from Cuba offering frontline primary and emergency care. They serve and cure, building trust in Cuba's name globally.
More:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrist/2015/06/08/cubas-most-valuable-export-its-healthcare-expertise/#722f64d8195e
Author's credentials:
Contributor
Bill Frist
I cover global and domestic health care and health care reform. FULL BIO
I am a nationally-acclaimed heart and lung transplant surgeon, former U. S. Senate Majority Leader, and chairman of the Executive Board of the health service private equity firm Cressey & Company. I now serve as chairman of the Hope Through Healing Hands foundation, a global health organization which focuses on maternal and child health and SCORE, a collaborative K12 education reform organization that has helped propel Tennessee to prominence as a reform state. I am also an adjunct professor of Cardiac Surgery at Vanderbilt University and clinical professor of Surgery at Meharry Medical College. I currently serve on the boards of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Partnership for a Healthier America” campaign to fight childhood obesity, and the Nashville Health Care Council.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrist/#48d1a92675cf
As you should know, Bill Frist is a very conservative Republican.
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