Stewart Rahr Quotes

With more than 1,300 sites of care, VA operates the largest integrated health care system in the county.

Health care providers, saving lives daily in our emergency rooms, live with federal mandates.

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.

Competition makes things come out right. Well, what does that mean in health care? More hospitals so they compete with each other. More doctors compete with each other. More pharmaceutical companies. We set up war. Wait a minute, let's talk about the patient. The patient doesn't need a war.

Nurses are an integral component of the health care system, and it is important that we recognize the over 2.7 million registered nurses for the significant work that they do.

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

Each and every day health centers provide high-quality primary and preventive care to our constituents.

Paul Farmer has helped to build amazing health care system in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. He founded Partners in Health, which serves the destitute and the sick in many parts of the world from Haiti to Boston and from Russia to Peru.

We want to make sure that we incentivize the health care system to be designed to provide you the best quality health care possible.

In Illinois, community, migrant, homeless and public housing health centers operate 268 primary care sites and serve close to 1 million patients every year.

Whatever we do, it is definitely time that we reboot the health care reform attempt. It's time to completely start over.

We need a vibrant Medicaid program and strategies to expand affordable access to health care for all, especially for the specialty care services that community health centers do not provide.

Nobody will ever be turned away at my city hospital.

We have telemedicine where, if you come into our office, you can go downstairs, and there's a machine there and a nurse there, and you talk to a doctor who works from a clinic down the street. It's just going to make a great health care system in the long run. We just have a lot of pains go through.

In order to have good health care you need a patient and you need a health care provider.

We must always make sure that our doctors work for their patients and not for the government

When you have 25 percent of the city not being able to afford care, health becomes everyone's responsibility.... What is the moral responsibility of a hospital? Do you assure basic services for the many, or do you retain complex sophisticated services that tend to affect the relatively few?

If the government didn't try to guarantee that everybody should have access to decent health care, it wouldn't happen.

My advice to the Sultan is to build hospitals for sick Muslims, with a staff of physicians and attendants who will cure them and minister to their needs

Our health care system has 21st century operating rooms and 19th century administrative rooms.

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.

We ration health care now. We just don’t ration very rationally.

When it comes to health care, the United States is on another planet. The United States spends about 35 percent more per capita than the next two highest-spending countries—Norway and Switzerland…no matter how we measure it—whether by life expectancy or for survival of specific diseases like asthma, heart disease, or some cancers; by the rate of medical errors; or simply by satisfaction with health services, the United States is actually doing worse than a number of countries like France or Germany… America spends far more than other countries, and doesn’t see better results.

What we need are more good doctors and fewer bad health plans.

The US, whose health care system is monopolized by corporations, has the worst infant mortality rate compared to 23 other wealthy countries whose health care system is still partly in public hands. US health care corporations are powerful lobbyists and generous financial benefactors to politicians on Capitol Hill. The US has 5% of the world's population and it spends 45% of the world's health dollars. Despite this, Americans' life expectancies are the lowest of 23 other wealthy nations' and lower than some Third World countries like Costa Rica.