Patient Advocacy Quotes

The forces that have worked hard to stoke populist anger against reform are the very ones that benefit from a health system which puts profits ahead of quality care for its patients.

I was on the board of the Mayo Clinic. I was diagnosed there, and I could pick up the phone and get a hold of whoever I wanted to. What I learned is that you really have to get proactive and manage your case.

I like being on the side of healthcare consumer.

Science has provided us with an alternative called stem cell research …. We’ve lost so much time already and I really can’t bear to wait anymore.

The Patients' Bill of Rights is necessary to guarantee that health care will be available for those who are paying for insurance. It's a part of the overall health care picture.

If the AMA [American Medical Association] is against you, you must be doing something right.

For me, I think that there's a lot missing from the recovery or the post-diagnosis side of treating patients. Once the diagnosis is made, I feel that care drops off tremendously, even though it is precisely the time that a patient needs help the most, even if they are not verbalizing it.

I have seen good nurses and bad nurses. They existed along a continuum: from hard-working, kind and competent people, to office-hugging, bone-idle types, to apathetic, disengaged automatons.

Nurses - nurses, you'm all the same. Full of cheerfulness over other people's troubles.

When doctors differ who decides amid the milliard-headed throng?

There will be far greater accountability, dramatically improved access, responsiveness, and expanded care options, but the Department of Veterans Affairs will not be privatized under my watch.

By offering individuals ownership and control of their health care coverage, we return control to the patients; and that is exactly where it should be.

People are still being put into geriatric wards when they don't need it. They need treatment, not just being put into bed and fed.

I'm not a caregiver.

Named after four activists and their families who fought for its passage, the Trickett Wendler, Frank Mongiello, Jordan McLinn, and Matthew Bellina Right to Try Act of 2017 establishes a new pathway for access to unapproved, investigational treatments. These four Americans fought for the Right to Try because they didn't want to give up.

I have mothers with small children come to me and say, 'You found that I had early breast cancer - because of you, I don't have cancer.' You've just prevented that person from dying early, and to prevent an early, unnecessary death is incredibly meaningful.

As my mentor in Medical School, Dr William Strong taught me: Never wear a white coat; it separates you from a fellow human being. I never have from that day on. You are your patients guide, counselor, and defender, not their ruler and dictator.

Reducing the price of AIDS drugs gave me so much satisfaction that I've been thinking what else I could do. One day, I thought, 'Let's look at cancer and see how we can spare cancer patients' unnecessary suffering.'

It took a child. It took a child with a blood transfusion not only to wake me up, but to wake America up, basically. I mean, I read about his plight in a doctor's office in New York in a magazine. I was so outraged about it that I contacted the family. We became friends. I helped them move to another place in Indiana. And we became constant friends.

Find a doctor who cares about you, because a big part of health care is caring.

In order to have good health care you need a patient and you need a health care provider.

When people affected by epilepsy are reluctant to expose their condition, the public remains in the dark about it - a tragic irony that has made patient care and raising funds for research more than challenging.

I have seen the healthcare system from many angles, including as a patient.

The Republican program is the profit-protection program for the insurance industry It's a bill of goods, it's a bill of wrongs. Ours is a patients' bill of rights.

English doctors have killed 3/4 of my friends & the joke is the remaining 1/4 go on recommending them, so odd is human nature.