Access to Treatment Quotes

Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people.

Malaria is a disease that kills one to three million people a year. 300 to 500 million cases are reported. It's estimated that Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year to the disease. Five dollars can save a life. We can send people to the moon; we can see if there's life on Mars - why can't we get five-dollar nets to 500 million people?

The average man with a need for an operation cannot afford a first class hospital …My medical pills run $400 to $500 a month and hell, I feel pretty good … Costs must be tempered..

What's more difficult than knowing there's an effective treatment for your children, but you can't afford to offer it to them because it's not covered by insurance?

Working together with Democrats and Republicans, I passed legislation to help break the grip of addiction. By investing in prevention, treatment, and recovery, empowering law enforcement, and stopping the overprescribing of painkillers, we can turn the tide.

I'm surviving a life-threatening illness. Many do not, such as those without celebrity and fortune who have to depend on the public healthcare system.

Some countries that I go to are still trying to deny that it's happening. In India, 2.1 million people are living with HIV AIDS. India manufactures most of the drugs that are used to cure HIV around the world, which is an amazing, amazing fact that most people don't know.

Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment.

It's unconscionable that cancer patients get the wrong diagnosis 30 percent of the time and that it takes so long to treat them with appropriate drugs for their cancer.

If you come from money and you become an addict, you go to the Betty Ford Clinic, you get treatment. If you're living on the street and you're an addict, it's much harder to find your way out.

Clearly, healthcare is a very important sector.

What I'm thinking about are the millions of people, many of whom write me very personal letters :"Dear Mr. President: I did not vote for you. I was against Obamacare. And then my son who didn't have health insurance signed up and we just found out that he had an illness. And thankfully he's now covered, otherwise he might not have gotten treatment and I might have lost my house."

When I was born in 1970 with a rare genetic disorder called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita (SED), medical science wasn't what it is today and my mum and dad were treated terribly by the medical profession.

All Hoosiers, all Americans, myself included, should never go broke in this country because you get sick or have a bad accident.

Thousands die each year because they are uninsured or under-insured.

We must find a way to cover those who are no longer healthy but need care.

The media in America is not covering American AIDS very much. They're covering African AIDS as if somehow miraculously it's all stopped here. Well, it hasn't, and the one thing they're not saying about Africa is that all those people are going to die; there's no way these people can be saved - none.

No one should have to choose between medicine and other necessities. No one should have to use the emergency room every time a child gets sick. And no one should have to live in constant fear that a medical problem will become a financial crisis.

It doesn't matter how rich or poor you are: when you're sick, you want the exact same thing.

Science offers the chance to cure debilitating and once-intractable disorders like hemophilia and sickle cell disease. But we need to make sure the ability to access these therapies, or the risk that someone can be locked out of them, doesn't widen gaps between the rich and poor.

I remember specifically, in the summer of 2002, the rate of women infected with HIV/AIDS was beginning to match the rate of men, and nobody was talking about it. It was as if it was on nobody else's radar. I had made up my mind to do something about it.

Let's not forget, we are all one diagnosis away from having a pre-existing condition.

The main reason I started The Katie Piper Foundation was because I had treatment abroad that I wanted other burns survivors in this country to have access to.

There are so few drugs for these killer diseases, but for erectile dysfunction, we have had 14 drugs since 1996… It says something about where the priorities of the pharmaceutical companies seem to lie.

Now there are laws in many parts of the world which reflect the best of human nature. These laws treat people touched by HIV with compassion and acceptance. These laws respect universal human rights and they are grounded in evidence.