Paul Allen Quotes

I began my career as a medical doctor in Ama Keng, a poor village in Lim Chu Kang. The people I cared for were ordinary Singaporeans. They were simple people who despite their hard work, had barely enough for themselves.

The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market.

We know Africa does not have the same medical treatments as we do.

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.

Malaria is a disease that kills one to three million people a year. 300 to 500 million cases are reported. It's estimated that Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year to the disease. Five dollars can save a life. We can send people to the moon; we can see if there's life on Mars - why can't we get five-dollar nets to 500 million people?

The need for this clinic is clear to me, to the veterans who are currently forced to travel hours to receive care, and even to the Veterans Administration that itself identified creation of a clinic in this part of our state as a priority to be completed by 2006.

I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I'm not sure how exactly we could manage.

I had seen AIDS patients in India and Africa, and knowing that people were dying even though drugs existed that could help them was shattering for me.

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.

In 1979, just after I became governor, I asked Hillary to chair a rural health committee to help expand health care to isolated farm and mountain areas. They recommended to do that partly by deploying trained nurse practitioners in places with no doctors to provide primary care they were trained to provide.

I know firsthand how our being such a rural state presents challenges to healthcare.

Most of the people who make decisions about global health are in the U.S. and Western Europe. There, the mental health care system is dominated by highly trained, expensive professionals in big hospitals, who often see patients over long periods of time. This simply can't be done in rural Africa or India. Who the hell can afford that kind of care?

The very rich, very poor, and the very famous get the worst medical care. The very rich can buy it, the very poor can't get any, and the very famous can dictate it.

Too many upstate New Yorkers have to drive 30 minutes or more to see a doctor.

We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease.

No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

Who goes from America to Africa for medical attention?

I was in a town of about 10,000 people, and a shipping container with a rusty microscope was their medical clinic.

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.

This is a third world environment.

In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It's very expensive.

I think Medicaid harms people.

You realize when you're pregnant how lucky you are to have access to medical care.

In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases.

Stopping TB requires a government program that functions every day of the year, and that's hard in certain parts of the world. And partly it's because of who tuberculosis affects: It tends to affect the poor and disenfranchised most.