Gro Harlem Brundtland Quotes

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

Your care and your treatment shouldn't be dictated by your ZIP code.

America enjoys the best health care in the world, but the best is no good if folks can't afford it, access it and doctor's can't provide it.

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.

Let's make health care a meritocracy. Access to the best care goes to people who did what they could to avoid becoming ill.

The United States has the best health system in the world. Unfortunately this is true only for those who can afford it.

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

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.

One of the problems fundamental to health care in the United States is access and cost.

Our health care is rationed by wealth.

Poor kids are much more likely to become sick than their richer counterparts, but much less likely to have health insurance. Talk about a double whammy.

There are whole states where people [with addiction or mental health issues] can't get to a doctor. If that were true of pancreatic cancer, if that were true of heart disease, if that were true of diabetes, we'd all understand that it made no sense at all. And yet we somehow approach mental health from a very different standard.

Real Texans don't want any woman to die of cancer because she can't get decent health care or medical advice. Real Texans don't want any woman to lose control of her life because she can't get birth control.

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.

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

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.

What do we have for veterans? Government-run health care. I understand that. Congressmen and senators... they get five choices of government-run health care. Why should a congressman and senator get anything more than a regular citizen does? Why are they privileged and the rest of us aren't?

I think that we have a number of different health care challenges in our country, and certainly addressing the uninsured is one, and the second is making sure that those with health insurance actually get the care that they assume they'll have available to them if they get sick.

The health care industry can play a great role in this by being aware of the fact that these children form perhaps the most neglected group of people in the country, largely because it is hard to find them.

You cannot drive a system that's going to be aiming at preventing illness if everyone is not in it. The whole gaming of health insurance and health care in America is based on that fundamental principle: insure people who aren't sick and you don't have to pay more money on them.

It is inexcusable that the richest country in the world does not take care of all of its people. We don't consider ourselves idealistic; we're thoughtfully trying to make a beautiful health care model.

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.

We have a country that wants to believe it is the best in everything, but until all of us embrace the idea that health care should be a right, not a privilege, our system cannot be glibly described as, quote, 'the best in the world.'

Cost containment too often becomes care containment. And it affects the least powerful population sector with the quietest voice.

How can we continue to condone a system which heals those who can pay but says to hell with those who can't.