Health care Quote by Muhammad Yunus
““In the United States I saw how the market liberates the individual and allows people to be free to make personal choices. But the biggest drawback was that the market always pushes things to the side of the powerful. I thought the poor should be able to take advantage of the system in order to improve their lot. Grameen is a private-sector self-help bank, and as its members gain personal wealth they acquire water-pumps, latrines, housing, education, access to health care, and so on. Another way to achieve this is to let abusiness earn profit that is then txed by the government, and the tax can be used to provide services to the poor. But in practice it never works that way. In real life, taxes only pay for a government bureaucracy that collects the tax and provides little or nothing to the poor. And since most government bureaucracies are not profit motivated, they have little incentive to increase their efficiency. In fact, they have a disincentive: governments often cannot cut social services without a public outcry, so the behemoth continues, blind and inefficient, year after year.””
About This Quote
Source Speech: Social Business Forum, 2005
Markets can empower individuals but often favor the powerful; taxes rarely reach the poor due to bureaucratic inefficiency.
In simple terms: Markets help but can be biased; taxes often don’t help the poor.
Key Takeaway
Design systems that directly empower the disadvantaged.
Themes
economics
social justice
policy
poverty alleviation
Mood
critical
concerned
Type
analytical
policy
When to use this quote
- development projects
- government programs
- NGO initiatives
Key Concepts
market failure
tax inefficiency
microfinance
Questions to Reflect On
- How can aid bypass inefficient bureaucracy?
- What alternative financing can empower the poor?
A Different Perspective
Assuming taxes will solve poverty can be unrealistic.
![“If [Donald] Trump throws 20 million off of health care, that's going to be - if he handles this badly - and it's very hard to handle it right, then that's a - a huge advantage in the mid-terms for us.” quote by Van Jones](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/f4d/van-jones-984_advantage_if-donald-trump-throws-20-million-off-of_12893.jpg)
