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Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.

Paul Farmer

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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Standing
Extreme
Poverty
Extremes
Health
Anywhere
Social
Capitalism
Insurance
Care
Market
Limitations
National
Sharp
Based
Regardless
Promise
Limitation

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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
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With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
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lean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.
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For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.
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I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.
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The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money
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Ebola has not yet come into contact with modern medicine in West Africa. But when protocols for the provision of high quality supportive care are followed, the case fatality rate for Ebola may be lower than 20 percent.
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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
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People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.
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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
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I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.
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Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.
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I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.
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You can't have public health without working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.
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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that's where He is.
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You can't have public health without a public health system. We just don't want to be part of a mindless competition for resources. We want to build back capacity in the system.
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If I am hungry, that is a material problem if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.
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I think, sometimes, that I'm going nuts, and that perhaps there is something good about blocking clean water for those who have none, making sure that illiterate children remain so, and preventing the resuscitation of the public health sector in the country most in need of it. Lunacy is what it is.
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In fact, it seems to me that making strategic alliances across national borders in order to treat HIV among the world's poor is one of the last great hopes of solidarity across a widening divide.
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