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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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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Ideas
Might
Viewed
Right
Equity
Something
Precious
Global
Essence
Health
Idea

More quotes by Paul Farmer

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Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
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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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Equity is the only acceptable goal
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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.
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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
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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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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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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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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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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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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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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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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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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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Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me.
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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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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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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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I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
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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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