Drew Pinsky Quotes

The role of government is to protect the public health.

It's now evident that public health is part of national security.

Surgeon general's job is to protect, promote and advance the health, safety and security of the nation.

If I were in politics, I'd make both left and right sit down and make good decisions about national health. It's a huge problem, and it is something we all should be part of.

A fair question could be posed in this fashion: If people are not obeying existing laws, what makes us think they would obey any new laws?

The safety of the people shall be the highest law.

The public health of five million children should not be left to luck or chance.

Reconciliation cannot be used to pass comprehensive health care reform. It won't work because it was never designed for that kind of significant legislation; it was designed for deficit reduction.

I'm sure that the standard of public morality we've helped build will force government in Canada to approve complete health insurance.

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.

[The] fundamental principal of all just legislation [is] that the legislature shall not take the property of A and give it to B.

For in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.

In the past, public health officials could argue that they were protecting people from external threats: carriers of contagious diseases, fumes from the local glue factory, contaminated water, food poisoning, dangerous quack remedies. By contrast, the new enemies of public health come from within; the aim is to protect people from themselves rather than each other.

… courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of legislative bodies, who are elected to pass laws

There is a general rule, which includes all the duties of a sovereign, and by which he may easily judge how to proceed under every circumstance. Let the safety of the people be the supreme law.

Let us give our Republic not the best possible laws but the best which they will bear.

Patents can be overridden to protect the public health.

I can attest to the very real potential for unnecessary pain, suffering, and death when the work of public-health officials is curtailed.

Washington has dedicated past global health initiatives to delivering food, drugs, and other health technologies to the world’s poor. In doing so, it has been able to achieve progress even in countries with dysfunctional governments. But it cannot enforce the regulations on smoke-free public places, food and drug safety, urban sanitation, and road traffic that are now needed in such settings. Accordingly, the fundamental challenge in this new area of global health is not necessarily new medicine but better governance.

There is a cost to every decision, and whether or not you impose a public health order has costs to industry and the public.

Every legislative meeting on how to pass health care, the communications director or someone from the communications team would be a part of because we did a lot of press interviews when we were trying to pass the Affordable Care Act specifically designed to help pass the bill.

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

If you can't legislate, you can't deal with problems.

Laws to protect 'public health' are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever.

By the way, what happened to our surgeon general who warned us about AIDS and smoking? That position has been completely stripped of power.