“Resources are always limited.” In international health, this saying had great force. It lay behind most cost-effectiveness analyses. It often meant, “Be realistic.” But it was usually uttered, Kim and Farmer felt, without any recognition of how, in a given place, resources had come to be limited, as if God had imposed poverty on places like Haiti. Strictly speaking, all resources everywhere were limited, Farmer would say in speeches. Then he’d add, “But they’re less limited now than ever before in human history.” That is, medicine now had the tools for stopping many plagues, and no one could
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