Richard Lamm Quotes

What you see is when the government gets involved, you run out of money and health care gets rationed.

The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80% of the total health care bill out there. There is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. The decision is not whether or not we will ration care. The decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.

The decision is not whether or not we will ration care. The decision will be whether we ration care with our eyes open.

We implicitly or explicitly ration health care no matter what we do.

It is inevitable that we are going to have to ration health care in the United States.

In the future we may have to ration health care, but we're not there now.

It is time to maximize and prioritize our health care dollars.

It is my passionate belief that we can all have better health care through rationing.

Every country in the world is battling the rising cost of health care. No community anywhere has demonstrably lowered its health-care costs (not just slowed their rate of increase) by improving medical services. They've lowered costs only by cutting or rationing them.

We ration health care now. We just don’t ration very rationally.

People don't like it, but inevitably we need to think about both the costs and the benefits of health care. We cannot avoid the financial consequences.

Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life... Indeed, many physicians were willing to lie to get patients what they needed from insurance companies that were trying to hold down costs.

But if you - if what - the reports are true, what they're saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that's going to increase our costs, we knew that.

Since the 1960s, there has been a tremendous expansion of the resources available to pay for health care.

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'd like to see the health care professionals making decisions, not some bureaucrat in Indianapolis working for an insurance company.

For the amount of money that the country is going to spend this year on health care, you can go out and hire a doctor for every seven families in the US and pay the doctor almost $230,000 a year to cover them.

Prescription drugs today represent 60¢ on every dollar spent for health care. Ten years ago it was only 10¢.

Most other rich countries not only spend less than the United States on health care; they also achieve better outcomes in both coverage and quality.

They call it managed care but it really is only managed costs.

We need to work together to fairly assess and improve the long-term economic and health value - and affordability - of all components of the healthcare system, including hospitalizations, drugs, devices, and other interventions, to optimize our health investment decisions.

What I want is a strong NHS delivering the highest standards of care anywhere in the world, and that is true to the founding values of the NHS, and I hope that, looking back on my time as health secretary, people can see that, actually, the foundations for that change were laid in the period that I was health secretary.

Patients would be better off if states were able to tailor the benefits that Medicaid covers - targeting resources to sicker people and giving healthy adults cheaper, basic coverage.

We have this fascination that more is better, and we - what we learned was more isn't better ; that more care can actually hurt you. That fascination with the quick fix is often hurting us. One-third of health-care spending doesn't even improve health care.

We are the richest country in the world. We spend more on health care than any other country. Yet we have the worst health care in the Western world. Come on. We can do better than this.