Health care

, health-care, or healthcare is the maintenance or improvement of health via the prevention,, treatment, recovery, or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people.

C

 * I don't think I know enough to say, well, here's the plan. It's not my specialty.... But I don't think there's any way not to have that debate about how much we're going to spend on health care.... In finding our way forward, we've got to be able to find ways to deliver the quality care that everyone expects and that we're capable of providing to the maximum number of people.
 * Dick Cheney, "The Weekend Interview: The Story of Dick Cheney's Heart", The Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2011.


 * So, recently, though it wasn’t reported here, there were negotiations with Australia to establish what’s called a free trade agreement.... The negotiations were held up for some time because the United States was objecting to Australia’s highly efficient health care system. ... Why was the U.S. objecting to the Australian system? Well, because the Australian system is evidence-based... They have to provide evidence that the drug actually does something, that it is better than some cheaper thing that’s already on the market. That evidence-based approach, the U.S. negotiators argued, is interference with free markets, because corporations must have the right to deceive... The claim itself is kind of amusing, I mean, even if you believe the free market rhetoric for a moment. The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices... But that’s the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that.
 * Noam Chomsky, Interviewed at 25th anniversary of the International Relations Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 26, 2005


 * As the most powerful state, the U.S. makes its own laws, using force and conducting economic warfare at will. It also threatens sanctions against countries that do not abide by its conveniently flexible notions of "free trade." In one important case, Washington has employed such threats with great effectiveness (and GATT approval) to force open Asian markets for U.S. tobacco exports and advertising, aimed primarily at the growing markets of women and children. The U.S. Agriculture Department has provided grants to tobacco firms to promote smoking overseas. Asian countries have attempted to conduct educational anti-smoking campaigns, but they are overwhelmed by the miracles of the market, reinforced by U.S. state power through the sanctions threat. Philip Morris, with an advertising and promotion budget of close to $9 billion in 1992, became China's largest advertiser. The effect of Reaganite sanction threats was to increase advertising and promotion of cigarette smoking (particularly U.S. brands) quite sharply in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, along with the use of these lethal substances. In South Korea, for example, the rate of growth in smoking more than tripled when markets for U.S. lethal drugs were opened in 1988. The Bush Administration extended the threats to Thailand, at exactly the same time that the "war on drugs" was declared; the media were kind enough to overlook the coincidence, even suppressing the outraged denunciations by the very conservative Surgeon-General. Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Peto estimates that among Chinese children under 20 today, 50 million will die of cigarette-related diseases, an achievement that ranks high even by 20th century standards.
 * Noam Chomsky, In Tony Evans (ed.), Human Rights Fifty Years on: A Reappraisal, 1997

F

 * We have been alienated by costs that soared beyond the means of all but the well-insured or wealthy; by specialization and the cold, quantifying approach that brushes past human concerns, and by the growing despair that comes from spending without regaining health.
 * Health care (including medical insurance) is now the third largest industry in the United States; medical costs are roughly 9 percent of the Gross National Product. Federal health costs are over fifty billion dollars. Neighboring hospitals duplicate expensive equipment, doctors order unnecessary laboratory tests to protect themselves from malpractice suits ("defensive medicine"). Even a simple office call now represents a major expenditure to the average person. Runaway costs, especially hospital charges, have made it all but impossible to enact any sort of national health plan.
 * Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian Conspiracy, (1980) Chapter 8, Healing Ourselves


 * Health and disease don't just happen to us. They are active processes issuing from inner harmony or disharmony, profoundly affected by our states of consciousness, our ability or inability to flow with experience. This recognition carries with it implicit responsibility and opportunity. If we are participating, however unconsciously, in the process of disease, we can choose health instead.
 * Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian Conspiracy, (1980) Chapter 8, Healing Ourselves

G

 * Practices need to be nimble and free of huge regulatory burden so that they can rapidly meet the changing needs of their community.
 * Dr. Lee Gross, president of Docs 4 Patient Care Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes direct primary care, as quoted in "Doctors Sick Of America’s Broken Health Care System Found A Better Way To Treat Patients" by Ashley Bateman, The Federalist (March 22, 2024)

H

 * [T]he COVID-19 crisis has sharply underscored the irrational nature of health care systems structured around corporate profit — the almost universal cutbacks to staffing and infrastructure (including critical care beds and s), the lack of  provision and the prohibitive cost of access to medical services in many countries, and the ways in which the property rights of pharmaceutical companies serve to restrict widespread access to potential therapeutic treatments and the development of vaccines. However, the global dimensions of COVID-19 have figured less prominently in much of the left discussion.
 * Adam Hanieh, This is a Global Pandemic – Let’s Treat it as Such, 27 March 2020, 

J

 * I don’t believe that the staff at listened to me and my symptoms, and my experience makes me fear that the low-income patients the hospital treats — the kinds of individuals my ER resident likely wants to help — may suffer from poor care and not even recognize it. Rather than injecting cultural Marxism into medicine in a way that politicizes the entire health care system, perhaps [the] generation of woke medical students should understand that the best type of social justice involves them simply doing their jobs.
 * Christopher Jacobs, "When I Went To The Doctor For Kidney Stones, She Cared More About Pronouns Than Patient Care", The Federalist (May 15, 2024)

K

 * Sarah Kliff spent the last year looking at over 1000 ER bills and has found outrageous facility fees, high costs for OTC drugs, and charges for simply sitting in the waiting room. Medicare for All would take these excess costs out of the equation...
 * Ro Khanna in a Twitter post (28 December 2018)


 * Our demand for Medicare for All must be stronger than Big Pharma lobbyists.
 * Ro Khanna in a Twitter post (28 December 2018)


 * Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.
 * Martin Luther King, Jr., Speech to the Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights – Chicago (25 March 1966), as quoted in Dan Munro, "America's Forgotten Civil Right - Healthcare", Forbes (28 August 2013). See also: Amanda Moore, "Tracking Down Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Words on Health Care", Huffington Post (18 August 2013)

L

 * Importantly, socialized medicine is not about health care, it is about control. Are you going to oppose the government or defy bureaucrats when they have the power of veto over your spouse’s or children’s health care?
 * Trevor Loudon, "The Fatal Flaw of Socialized Health Care"

O

 * Healthcare is one of the areas where open data will potentially take off soonest and have the biggest impact.
 * Tim O'Reilly, "Open Source and the future of print in the age of the Social Network", Linux Voice, February 20, 2015. (WebCite archive)

S

 * Criticism should not be focused on Nazi Germany alone but extend beyond to include physicians in democratic countries, as well. Physicians outside Germany before the war, in the United States in particular were well aware of the evolving racist thrust of the health care system. They chose to remain silent.
 * William E. Seidelman (1992). Quoted in, The War Against Children of Color: Psychiatry Targets Inner-City Youth (1998), Peter R. Breggin, M.D., Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, ISBN 1567511279 ISBN 1567511260( 2002 ed., ISBN 1567511260 ISBN 9781567511260 ch. 7, Condemned by Science: The Role of Psychiatry in the Holocaust, p. 124.


 * America's health care system is second only to Japan … Canada, Sweden, Great Britain … well, all of Europe. But you can thank your lucky stars we don't live in Paraguay!
 * Homer Simpson in The Simpsons, Season 4, episode 11: "Homer's Triple Bypass", written by Gary Apple and Michael Carrington


 * I have always been a proponent of a national health care system. It just seemed eminently fair and right. How can we call this a civilized society when the children or parents of the rich get the medical attention they need in order to stay alive, while members of working-class families, who lack health insurance, have to die or needlessly suffer--or go hopelessly into debt to get the care they need? This is an outrageous injustice and it cannot be rationally defended.
 * Bernie Sanders, Outsider in the House (1997), p.175


 * You have countries like Denmark, Sweden, Norway ... which have had social democratic governments. ... In those countries, healthcare is a right for all people. ... Tuition is free. ... In those countries, governments are working for the middle class, rather than the billionaire class."
 * Bernie Sanders, in Late Night with Seth Meyers (2 June 2015)


 * 29 million people have no health insurance today in America. We pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. One out of five Americans can't even afford the prescriptions their doctors are writing. Millions of people have high deductibles and co-payments. I don't know what economists Secretary Clinton is talking to, but what I have said, is that the family right in the middle of the economy would pay $500 dollars more in taxes, and get a reduction in their healthcare costs of $5,000 dollars. In my view healthcare is a right of all people, not a privilege, and I will fight for that.
 * Bernie Sanders, in Democratic Presidential Debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,  The Washington Post   (11 February 2016)


 * There is one major country that does not guarantee health care to all people. There is one major country--the United States--which ends up spending almost three times per capita what they do in the U.K. guaranteeing health care to all people, 50 percent more than they do in France guaranteeing health care to all people, far more than our Canadian neighbors, who guarantee health care to all people.
 * Bernie Sanders, in Democratic Presidential Debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,  The Washington Post   (11 February 2016)


 * When you look around the world, you see every other major country providing health care to all people as a right, except the United States. You see every other major country saying to moms that, when you have a baby, we’re not gonna separate you from your newborn baby, because we are going to have — we are gonna have medical and family paid leave, like every other country on Earth. Those are some of the principles that I believe in, and I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.
 * Bernie Sanders,


 * I agree with what goes on in Canada and in Scandinavia: guaranteeing healthcare to all people as a human right. I believe that the United States should not be the only major country on Earth not to provide paid family and medical leave. I believe that every worker in this country deserves a living wage and that we expand the trade union movement... what we should be doing is creating an economy that works for all of us, not 1%.
 * Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders on Democratic Socialism: We Want to Create an Economy That Works for All of Us   (13 September 2019)