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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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The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
Paul Farmer
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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 biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.
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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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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.
Paul Farmer
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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
Paul Farmer