Cuba Getting Internet Upstream Via Venezuela

An anonymous reader writes "Seems like Cuba is working around the US internet embargo by teaming up with Venezuela: A confidential contract released yesterday on Wikileaks reveals Cuba's plan to receive internet upstream via an undersea cable to Venezuela, thus circumventing the enduring embargo of the US, denying Cuba access to nearby American undersea cables and overcoming the current limits of satellite-only connectivity. The connection, to be delivered by CVG Telecom of Venezuela, is to be completed by 2010 and will provide data, video as well as voice service for both the public and governmental services."

Comments

Re:Surprised?

[uncqual]

Of course, much of the extra $2200/year probably goes to "excessive" tests to avoid litigation and to fund treatments of people who have little chance for survival anyway -- one advantage of socialized medicine is that the government gets to decide when further treatment doesn't make "economic sense" - when an insurance company in the US tries to do this, the family sues too often. Arguments can be made that either way is "right" - US residents are used to getting care that is really futile - some sort of "life at any cost" bias (why, for example, should a system spend millions of dollars saving one child even though they are so severely disabled that they will never be able to even communicate with their own family or even understand they have a family?)

From drug cost standpoint, this discrepancy is not too surprising. US pharmaceutical companies rely on profits from US sales to fund research -- without those profits, quite a few hi-tech drugs simply would not exist or would not be available in the US (due to the cost of meeting FDA requirements and the tort risks). If they can sell slightly above cost of production in countries with socialized medicine, they might as well do so, but the miserly returns from those markets would never have justified development costs of the drug (also, it means they still have a supply of human guinea pigs for trials for drugs still in development).

Thus, the "excessive profits" the US patients (and Federal government, State governments, and insurance companies) pay for these drugs should really be classified as a tax that is directed to foreign aid.

The pharmaceutical companies heavily use, for example, Europe for trials because there the national health care system sometimes offers the patient two choices (1) the "standard treatment" which, with your advanced form of cancer has little chance of working or (2) adding ONE other experimental drug which might increase your chances of remission. Of course, aggressive US patients can sometimes pick from a variety of trials so they tend to pick the ones that they feel are in their best interests rather than the pharmaceutical company's best interests.