Paul Farmer Quotes

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

We need to make sure that access to a curative drug doesn't become a yardstick by which poverty is eventually measured. Doing so requires a shared commitment between innovators and the insurance plans that are harder pressed to offer these advances to the poor.

Community health centers do a great deal with limited resources. They provide critical medical care services to many who would otherwise have no other place to go or would end up in an emergency room.

It's easy to complain that pharmaceutical companies place profits over people and apparently care more about hair loss than TB. However, many in the pharmaceutical industry would be glad for the opportunity to reorient their research toward medicines that are truly needed, provided only that such research is financially sustainable.

When a company owns a drug, it has a responsibility to make sure that the drug is available to all who need it.

Your care and your treatment shouldn't be dictated by your ZIP code.

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

Today the biggest problem in caring for those with AIDS is no longer mainly a medical or scientific problem. The crisis is access to affordable drugs.

America enjoys the best health care in the world, but the best is no good if folks can't afford it, access it and doctor's can't provide it.

I think first and foremost everybody should understand that Canadians are strongly committed to the system of universal health insurance, to the principle that your ability to pay does not determine your access to critical medical service.

When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in American medical magazines and textbooks, I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor.

In the same vein as these events, National Minority Health Month also serves as a reminder of how much work needs to be done to eliminate health and healthcare inequities.

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.

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.

Scores of Congolese die each day unnecessarily due to the lack of access to healthcare and modern medicine.

Today we see a human population of over 6 billion people, many of whom have serious medical conditions, which either can't be treated or cannot be treated economically.

The Grameen clinics prove that a medical system 'for the poor' can be almost entirely self-supporting, and we hope we can make it fully self sufficient so we can expand it across Bangladesh.

We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society.

A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. By the same token, even the best-stocked delivery system will have an inadequate impact if it fails to reach the poor.

Let's make health care a meritocracy. Access to the best care goes to people who did what they could to avoid becoming ill.

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

Universal coverage, not medical technology, is the foundation of any caring health care system.

It is very clear that the present system of innovation for medicines is very inefficient and really somewhat corrupt. It benefits shareholders over patients; it produces for the rich markets and not for the poor and does not produce for minority diseases.

I'd like to think Helen very much understood what it was to be disadvantaged in the medical field. And that that was something that she never let dictate her choices.

Reducing the price of cancer drugs is a humanitarian move.