Tamara Jones, writing in the Los Angeles Times, noted, "Ten months after the new Germany emerged, women in the eastern sector are coming to the stunning realization that, in many ways, democracy has set them back 40 years." A U.S. News and World Report dispatch made the same point about women in the east: "Like many other women in what used to be the German Democratic Republic, she worries that political liberalization has cost her social and economic freedom. ... The kindergartens that cared for their children are becoming too expensive, and West Germany's more restrictive abortion laws threaten to deny many Eastern women a popular form of birth control." (Oh, but remember, here in the United States, land of abortion for any or no reason, the procedure is never, ever used as a method of birth control -- or so say the feminists.)
When the Soviet Union went out of business, the real state of its health care system -- indeed all social services -- was revealed at last. Instead of the gleaming socialist clinics presided over by crisp female physicians, we found a Third World system without even the rudiments of modern plumbing, far less modern medical equipment. As Robert Conquest wrote in"Reflections on a Ravaged Century," Moscow's health minister acknowledged in 1991 that half of the hospitals in the (capital) had no sewerage, 80 percent lacked hot water, and some 17 percent did not have running water of any sort."
And yet the idiocy persists and persists. We are still subjected to glowing reports about Cuba's "free" universal health care and world-beating literacy levels.
Today, The Washington Post can write that in Eastern Europe, "The countries communist officials ... left behind a threadbare health care system with equipment that barely functions and doctors so poorly paid that most expect cash in an envelope from patients to top off their government salaries." Further, Germany spends $2,422 per person on health care each year, while Hungary spends about $315 and Poland just $246."
It's amazing, isn't it, how capitalism has destroyed the wonderful health care systems of the communist east?