Thomas R. Frieden Quotes

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.

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

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

In my own view, the life expectancy of Native Americans in the United States is one of the really great moral crises that we face.

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.

There is just no reason why the richest nation in the world can't provide health care to all its people.

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.

We have common enemies today. It's called childhood poverty. It's called cancer. It's called AIDS. It's called Parkinson's. It's called Muscular Dystrophy.

If a severe pandemic materializes, all of society could pay a heavy price for decades of failing to create a rational system of health care that works for all of us.

I travel the world visiting global health programs as an ambassador for the global health organization, PSI, and sometimes the disconnect I see is truly striking: people can get cold Coca Cola, but far too infrequently malaria drugs; most own mobile phones, but don't have equal access to pre-natal care.

Social inequality kills. It unduly deprives individuals and communities experiencing social deprivation of their health, increases their burden of disease and disease, and cuts short their lives.

If your baby is going to die and it doesn't have to, it shouldn't matter how much money you make.

The world is rich enought today that the idea of millions of children dying of disease is unacceptable. We have the resouurces and know how to prevent this.

It's amazing how often campaigners in rich countries think poor people don't get backache.

Free quality health facilities have been made available to the children of the poor families through Daanish School System.

In the United States, I feel like polio doesn't exist, but it very much does. I've been to many countries and saw how lucky we are that we can go straight to the doctor or the ER in the U.S. I would love for moms in other countries to not experience my fears.

We have a failing Medicaid system, and you know who that's going to hurt in the end are the most vulnerable in people in our society.

Health is the one thing we all have in common regardless of race, creed, or income. Everyone should participate in creating the solutions.

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.

If you look upon chronic diseases as an epidemic, and you see that the chronically ill are the poor, then you see that this issue of the uninsured is not really a moral but a financial obligation to change health care.

It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.

In Jamaica, we eradicated polio many years ago, but there are a lot of kids suffering in Africa still.

This idea of universal access to basic healthcare has to be figured out as a world. No country has figured it out in part because it is driven by ideology.

Tackling malaria in a country like the Central African Republic is a huge uphill battle, and my experiences there have been a healthy dose of reality, fueling my own sense of urgency to do my part in reducing the preventable suffering of the incredible women I met.