Ryan Meili > Quotes

“When you try to save money by sacrificing people's lives, you lose both.”
― Ryan Meili, A Healthy Future: Lessons from the Frontlines of a Crisis

“This is the frightening thing to me, that the lesson that Canada's far right - which is increasingly how one would have to define the Prairie conservative parties - has learned is not to do what must be done to achieve the best outcomes, but to turn off the lights as soon as possible. The political calculus won out over the moral. Whatever the issue - COVID, suicide rates, poverty, crime, employment - if the lesson is to hide and obscure the data earlier and more effectively, then the very idea of a Canada led by its people is at risk. Free and timely access to information is an essential ingredient for democracy.”
― Ryan Meili, A Healthy Future: Lessons from the Frontlines of a Crisis

“When we undertake interventions that decrease income inequality, we also decrease heart disease and stroke. When we tackle food security, we tackle diabetes. When we improve literacy, we improve life expectancy. We save lives, and we save money. Investments today pay off over time in lowered health, social services, and justice costs, in economic productivity.”
― Ryan Meili, A Healthy Future: Lessons from the Frontlines of a Crisis

“Investing in people, who are the heart of the economy, is the key to economic success. Healthy people go to work, start businesses, pay taxes, make art, enjoy life. If we want long-term economic success, the health of human beings is not a side benefit, it's the foundation.”
― Ryan Meili, A Healthy Future: Lessons from the Frontlines of a Crisis

“Folk wisdom and empirical evidence agree: keeping people healthy is much less expensive and much more effective than treating the sick.”
― Ryan Meili, A Healthy Future: Lessons from the Frontlines of a Crisis

“This threat of unsustainability is the constant, and most compelling, cry of those who would establish a private health care system in parallel to Medicare. Driven by the belief that health care is a commodity that can be best delivered through profit, they argue that the current system would be helped and not threatened by this change. The evidence is clear: this is rubbish. Wherever it has been tried (in other countries and in limited ways here in Canada), a parallel system has increased waiting lists and practitioner shortages in the public system. It also erodes commitment to funding the public system by those who can afford to sidestep the queues, ultimately leading to two systems that are very different in quality and cost.”
― Ryan Meili, A Healthy Society: How a Focus on Health Can Revive Canadian Democracy

“One of the best ways for governments to perpetuate the ability to make bad decisions for the majority, with the support of the majority, is to diminish the quality of education.”
― Ryan Meili, A Healthy Society: How a Focus on Health Can Revive Canadian Democracy