James Douglas Quotes

How do you deliver the best possible and affordable health care to maximize health?

The NHS is a bit iffy when you sprain an ankle, but when it's a high-priority issue, it's fantastic. They don't mess about. They're incredibly efficient when things go wrong.

Families represent the basic building blocks of our society, and primary care a foundational piece of any healthcare system.

The traditional way that society looks at healthcare is to let people get terribly sick and then have an emergency room to take care of them and spend a lot of money on acute care for people who would have been kept out of hospital in the first place if they had had a lifestyle change.

Too often, patients without a primary doctor go to expensive hospital emergency rooms for nonurgent care.

Community health centers do a great deal with limited resources. They provide critical medical care services to many who would otherwise have no other place to go or would end up in an emergency room.

We need to start training more primary health providers and fewer specialists. We will never be able to control health care costs unless we challenge the over-emphasis on medical research, specialists and technology and put more emphasis on delivering good, everyday basic medicine to those who now have none.

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care.

I think the problem with the country is that we operate on a sickness model, not a wellness model... Basically, we treat people who become ill. What we don't do is do a very good job in keeping them healthy in the first place...

Communities across the nation play an important role in leading the way toward healthier families, and the Affordable Care Act helps make prevention an important priority for every community.

Your health shouldn't rely on pleas for kindness from strangers. We can and will do better.

In a successful health system, the proportion of per-capita health dollars used for home care, outpatient primary care, and preventive services should actually increase, not decrease, relative to those for acute hospital care.

I think we need more community health programs and we need to develop programs that are low-cost.

The provision of healthcare in America has been a major policy issue for many decades. From the establishment of Medicare & Medicaid to the Affordable Care Act, we have struggled to find a solution for not just providing access to healthcare - but also becoming a healthier population.

My contention is that if we expand the patient-centered health care approach, we'll have less people that have to go the medical clinic that provides free service or go to the emergency room - they can have their own health care plan.

No one should have to choose between medicine and other necessities. No one should have to use the emergency room every time a child gets sick. And no one should have to live in constant fear that a medical problem will become a financial crisis.

Look, if you have somebody who doesn't have health insurance, who doesn't have a doctor or dentist, and in order to deal with their cold or flu or dental problem, they go to an emergency room - in general, that visit will cost ten times more than walking into a community health center.

There is just no reason why the richest nation in the world can't provide health care to all its people.

The emergency care Americans receive can fall short of what they expect and deserve.

Making sure that health care is affordable for every American. I think that is very, very important.

Moreover, health center services save money and lives by treating diseases before they become chronic conditions, require hospital care or require a trip to the emergency room.

Let's make health care a meritocracy. Access to the best care goes to people who did what they could to avoid becoming ill.

Since the reduction of risk factors is the scientific basis for primary prevention, the World Health Organization promotes the development of an integrated strategy for prevention of several diseases, rather than focusing on individual ones.

We can have the best health insurance options in the world, and people still won't get needed care if we don't increase our supply of primary care physicians and nurses.

[Advocating health care reform:] We've got to remove the incentive for people on welfare to stay on welfare because that's the only way they'll get health care.