Eula Biss Quotes

Poor kids are much more likely to become sick than their richer counterparts, but much less likely to have health insurance. Talk about a double whammy.

All over the U.S. there are people whose lives are being destroyed for lack of proper health care provision, and there is no sight more odious than the rich, powerful and arrogant trying to keep it that way.

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.

Rich men do not lack physicians, but the poor can rarely afford good ones. We must pay special attention to them.

There is no mercy in a system that makes health care a luxury. There is no mercy in a country that turns their back on those most in need of protection: the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the suffering.

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

The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.

Never have so many had such broad and advanced access to health care. But never have so many been denied access to health.

We have never seen health as a right. It has been conceived as a privilege, available only to those who can afford it. This is the real reason the American health care system is in such a scandalous state.

My kids are obviously growing up very privileged, but I want them to have a servant's heart. We do community service as a family, and I also call them out on things like getting impatient when they stand in line - because they hardly ever have to. But that's just the reality of what they were born into.

Rich kids who write songs about food stamps always piss me off. I'm not going to write any songs about that, either.

Being disabled gave me an immense advantage. People are kinder to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole and secure.

We live in a world where not everyone has the urge to help others... It is OK to encourage others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but if you do, just remember that some people have no boots.

in this society, dominated as it is by the profit-seeking ventures of monopoly corporations, health has been callously transformed into a commodity - a commodity that those with means are able to afford, but that is too often entirely beyond the reach of others.

My own son has a congenital heart condition, where his life was saved by a cardiac surgeon stepping in at 11 days of life to save his life. But he is now 21 years old because of constant monitoring and working with him with a primary care physician. that's the only reason now that he's getting to live a long and healthy life. That's what we're not rewarding. They don't have the kind of resources and commitment that we are giving to people like me. I have millions of dollars of equipment available to me when I go to work every day in an operating room.

Many people believe in eliminating gaps and eliminating poverty. They don't realize that in some sense those two things are antithetical. If you were to double everyone's income, or if everyone's income were doubled naturally over the course of time, then you would reduce poverty significantly but you would have also increased the gap.

You can look at a slum or a peasant village, but it is only by entering into the world - by living in it -that you begin to understand what it is like to be powerless, to be like Christ.

Rich white people show up in a poor country to pursue their leisure-time fun, get served by black and brown people, and live in relative - or absolute - comfort. In the water, that situation can get turned on its head, though. Local kids learn to surf, know the breaks, and take most or all of the best waves, fuming turistas be damned.

Kids suffering, with no opportunities for lack of having their basic human needs [met], like food, health, and education, but at the same time, [it] motivates me to keep fighting for them, for the ones less fortunate.

The medical profession [in Egypt] is also very commercial. Health is not given to the poor. You know, if you have money, you have medical care; if you do not, then you are in trouble. I was not ready at all to build my economic security on the diseases of people, on suffering, especially of women and children. So, in a way, I rebelled against it.

A white college student from a private college goes into a poor neighborhood and volunteers four hours a week and that's considered exemplary. [Whereas] a poor kid who lives in that community and takes care of all the kids in that neighborhood four hours every day is not seen as a volunteer.

... I'm much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top, and the latter won't forgive me for it.

Sometimes people think that because you have money and position you are immune from the human experience. But I can feel as lonesome and lost as the next man when I turn the key in the door and go into an empty house that is usually full of kids and dogs.

We have no healthcare and we have all the guns in the world, it makes you think twice before you start throwing punches in a bar.