Howard Dean Quotes

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care.

Our health care system is terribly broken… Health comes from much more than health care and health care is much more than hospitals. We do a good job on treatment and a terrible job on prevention.

[Public Health] means the saving and lengthening of lives of thousands of citizens, the extension of the vigorous working period well into old age, and the prevention of inefficiency, misery, and suffering. These advances can be made by organized social effort. Public health is purchasable.

Health is both the foundation of my academic and professional careers and a personal passion. I know first-hand the important role health security plays in protecting lives and preventing the spread of disease.

Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.

America's health care system is in crisis precisely because we systematically neglect wellness and prevention.

As 17th U.S. Surgeon General, I was privileged to serve as the nation's doctor. I focused much of my time on promoting proven programs and individual steps that lead to good health.

Since the reduction of risk factors is the scientific basis for primary prevention, the World Health Organization promotes the development of an integrated strategy for prevention of several diseases, rather than focusing on individual ones.

The health of our nation is the wealth of our nation.

Public health service should be as fully organized and as universally incorporated into our governmental system as is public education. The returns are a thousand fold in economic benefits, and infinitely more in reduction of suffering and promotion of human happiness.

Health is more than the absence of disease…It is also education….We have a health illiterate society.

A prevention-based society is one in which every institution, whether they're a hospital or a clinic, or a school, an employer or a faith-based organization, recognizes and embraces the role that it can play in improving health.

The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.

Vaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare.

Access to basic quality health care is one of the most important domestic issues facing our nation.

The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend.

Our goal is to make Maine the healthiest state in the nation and reduce our overall health care costs.

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

I want us to be judged by the impact we have on the health of the people of Africa and the health of women. Improvements in the health of the people of Africa and the health of women are key indicators of the performance of WHO. This is a health organization for the whole world... But we must focus our attention on the people in greatest need.

The objective of the World Health Organization shall be "the attainment by all peoples of highest possible level of health.

When you help make people healthier, it makes the nation healthier; it makes the world healthier. It makes the economy healthier.

I loved clinical practice, but in public health, you can impact more than one person at a time. The whole society is your patient.

In a successful health system, the proportion of per-capita health dollars used for home care, outpatient primary care, and preventive services should actually increase, not decrease, relative to those for acute hospital care.

Vaccination and other essential preventive services must be delivered close within communities.

Encouraging wellness and prevention helps improve quality of life and can lower costs, too. I saw too many patients who had poor health because of their decisions, but too often, all they needed was a doctor to help point them in the right direction.