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Equity is the only acceptable goal

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
Equity
Acceptable
Goal

More quotes by Paul Farmer

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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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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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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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I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.
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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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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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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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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
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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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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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It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.
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The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
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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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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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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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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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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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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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