from Democracy Now!:
Dr. Paul Farmer Challenges Profit-Driven Medical System While Bringing Healthcare to Poor Communities WorldwidePaul Farmer is not your ordinary doctor. In going to the poorest places on earth, he is not only treating patients, but challenging whole healthcare systems. More than twenty year ago, Dr. Farmer co-founded the charity Partners in Health to provide free medical care in central Haiti. Today, Partners In Health provides healthcare for people with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other conditions in Haiti and eight other countries around the world. We spend the hour with Dr. Farmer on his work, his remarkable background and the challenges of pursuing healthcare with a social justice perspective.
Guest:
Dr. Paul Farmer, Professor of medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School and is the co-founder of Partners in Health. He is also associate chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. His books include Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor and From Outrage to Courage: Women Taking Action for Health and Justice.
AMY GOODMAN: Paul Farmer is not your ordinary doctor. In going to the poorest places on earth, he is not only treating patients, he’s challenging whole healthcare systems. And the United States is not exempt from his analysis. The titles of his books reflect his diagnoses, from Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues to Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, as well as From Outrage to Courage: Women Taking Action for Health and Justice.
More than twenty years ago, Dr. Farmer founded a charity called Partners in Health to provide free medical care in central Haiti. Today, Partners in Health provides healthcare for people with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other conditions in Haiti, as well as, well, more than eight other countries around the world, including Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Mexico, Guatemala and Boston.
Dr. Farmer’s success has made him a celebrity in the world of global healthcare. He’s a professor of medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School and associate chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Dr. Paul Farmer joins us today for the hour.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
DR. PAUL FARMER: Thank you. Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. You’re giving the graduation address today, the commencement address at John Jay?
DR. PAUL FARMER: I am.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you going to be talking about?
DR. PAUL FARMER: I think I’m going to talk about how we can—how these young people can be part of a movement that’s nascent right now that we see before us, a movement that focuses not only on one problem, like environmental justice, but on social justice and inequality in general. I want it to be funny, of course, but—
AMY GOODMAN: Social justice and healthcare, can you talk about how you combine the two?
DR. PAUL FARMER: Well, you know, it was, for me, an epiphany to go twenty-five years ago to go to Haiti, and I was lucky enough to end up in a squatter settlement of peasants who had lost their land to a hydroelectric dam. So the choices were very stark. You know, either health was a commodity that was bought and sold, or the people that I went there to serve, as a, you know, naive but well-meaning young person, were out of the picture. And so, you know, that began a lifelong fascination with rights, not just to the right to vote or other civil and political rights, but also the right to eat and the right to have access to healthcare. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/28/dr_paul_farmer_challenges_profit_driven 
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