In Response...

So shortly after reading and posting that last article, I came across a recent interview on Democracy Now! with Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health and the author of several books addressing social justice and health care. I found the discussion pertinent to the other article and wanted to share. In this particular section he talks about the system they developed in Haiti and how it in many ways provides better care than what is offered in the United States...

And the system that we built up in the ’80s, really confronting another disease, tuberculosis, relied very heavily on community health workers, who we trained and, more to the point, we paid. You know, we thought, you know, do we expropriate the labor of the poor, or do we actually pay them, like someone like I would get paid a fortune to do consulting work like this. And we said no, no, no, it’s clear they have to be our employees and coworkers. So it worked great. And it worked great for tuberculosis. It worked great for other chronic diseases. And when AIDS came along, what we did was to say, well, clearly, we need to take the same system, which is free diagnosis and free care to the patient, because this is a public health problem, and they have a community health worker, you know, visiting them.
Entire Interview