Tom Harkin Quotes

As a society, almost one 1 of 2 adults has a chronic disease of one form or another. And where we're spending $3 trillion a year not on a healthcare system, but on a sick-care system that tries to patch us up after we've been made ill by a variety of institutional things around us - including a sick food system, air pollution, etc. Where we could be doing so much better even before people get to the point of getting sick.

I don't think people were overmedicated, but I think health care cannot stop in the clinic. If all we do is throw pills and procedures at people after they're already sick and we don't deal with what's making them sick to start with, that's a real problem.

What we have in the United States is not so much a health-care system as a disease-care system.

If you really want people to remain healthy, you can't just throw pills at people once they become sick, which I feel like I was doing as a medical doctor, so I began working on more upstream thinking.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon... or a cardiologist... or a pediatrician... or even a policy wonk to figure out that a penny's worth of preventive care is worth many dollars of sick care.

Things like depression and obesity are global challenges.

The world cannot continue to build larger health care systems where you just sit around and wait for people to get sick.

The traditional way that society looks at healthcare is to let people get terribly sick and then have an emergency room to take care of them and spend a lot of money on acute care for people who would have been kept out of hospital in the first place if they had had a lifestyle change.

Issues like obesity do, as you well know, have a knock-on effect to diabetes. So we all are better off if we invest early in prevention.

Why don't we just get our population healthier so we don't need medical care?

The problem with most children's hospitals is that they are passive. They are high quality. They are filled with the best doctors. But their function is to wait until kids get sick and get referred in.

What I think a doctor should do is prevent disease, by any means necessary.

I want to make people aware of early detection.

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.

Obesity is racing through America, everywhere. It's high time someone spent some money to do something about it.

I think the problem with the country is that we operate on a sickness model, not a wellness model... Basically, we treat people who become ill. What we don't do is do a very good job in keeping them healthy in the first place...

How can we keep people healthy, and if they get sick, how can we treat them right the first time?

We have a disease care system, not a health care system.

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.

We have a system that's really founded on profit and on selling pharmaceuticals as opposed to keeping people healthy and then helping them get back to health.

Wellness is cheaper than illness. It costs us time and money when children get sick.

The country can't get well if the people are sick. And the people are sick.

The surgeon general is responsible for sharing scientifically-based information with the public so that they can improve their health. But I will say personally that my goal as surgeon general is to help build a culture of prevention in America so that we are a nation that is as good at preventing illness as we are at treating it.

I think public health is kind of in a very sad state of affairs here in this country.

Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all of the time