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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.

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
Without
Build
Resources
Capacity
Health
System
Public
Part
Mindless
Back
Competition

More quotes by Paul Farmer

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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
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I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti.
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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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If I am hungry, that is a material problem if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.
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At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease.
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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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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
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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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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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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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The idea that because you're born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you're born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.
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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
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Equity is the only acceptable goal
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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.
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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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We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.
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The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.
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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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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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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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