You know that public health in Nazi Germany was in some ways exemplary, too: Nazi doctors were the first to make the connection between smoking and cancer. Smoking was forbidden on trams and other public spaces in Germany in the 30s. German scientific papers that argued the association between tobacco and cancer were ingnored by the American Medical establishment, right through until the end of the 50s. But Nazi public health *was* tainted. German fears of contamination were allied with retrograde political views.
'Public health' in the eastern bloc might have been good. (As a qualification one has to add that life expectancy and infant mortality there lagged behind US and Western European standards - and to this day the European Union is struggling with the appalling environmental health problems bequeathed by Ceaucescu and the other tin pot dictators.) But even if public health in the east was good, it was at the cost of political acquiescence to state apparatuses that were reactionary. Patrician ideologies of state care coincided with the suppression of working class independence. Certainly in East Germany public health was just another arm of the secret police, sharing records and so on.
It is the eastern bloc's sordid record that has done most to besmirch the idea of socialism in the eyes of ordinary people. Listening to Joanna and Chris, anyone would be bound to ask how it was that the market was re-imposed on Eastern Europe; why didn't the people of the 'communist' countries rise up to prevent it? How was it that it was the 'communist' regimes that were overthrown in the nineties and not the capitalist ones? The answer is painfully simple. Their populations did not identify with the state in Romania or the USSR, however much Chris or Joanna might have.
'My experience is of living in Romania and remembering the living conditions of the intelligentsia (superb) and those of the working class (pretty good) -- compared to now. Even in the darkest days of the Ceausescu regime, there were not thousands of children living in the sewers of Bucharest...as they do now. There was an era in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union when most people felt they had a right to health care, child care, a good education, work, .... and they did have access to all this. Yes, I do think Stalin was the gravedigger of the revolution and I do think that Ceausescu was a psychotic tin pot dictator, but even they could not defeat the revolutionary expectations of the working class after the Russian revolution and after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
If most Americans believed that health care, education, work, social support was their right, this would be a very different world.'