I want people to start thinking about what it means to be HIV-positive and to ask questions about that.
Annie LennoxRead
We spend billions on marginal and often unnecessary procedures on people who are in the final dying process, yet we leave millions of Americans out of the health insurance system, and America's kids have the worst dental health in the developed world.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote criticizes the prioritization of excessive medical spending over providing basic health care to those in need.
Richard Lamm's quote highlights the disparity in the American healthcare system, where vast resources are allocated to expensive and often unnecessary medical procedures for patients nearing the end of life, while millions lack adequate health insurance and children suffer from poor dental health. This observation points to an imbalance in healthcare priorities, emphasizing the need for reform to address the basic health needs of vulnerable populations rather than merely expending resources on marginal treatments.
Themes
HealthcarePrioritiesInsuranceDental HealthReform
In practice
Example use cases
In a health policy debate, this quote can be used to emphasize the need for equitable health care access.
Similar quotes
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.
Herbert HooverRead
The wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings. Let food be your medicine.
HippocratesRead
Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.
Ivan IllichRead
While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health.
Michael PollanRead
In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to keep the party going.
Edmund WhiteRead