Andrew Lansley Quotes

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

I believe a nation does not maximize its health care until it starts to ask the hard question: How can we prioritize our expenditures to buy the most health care for the most people? We should not apologize for rationing; we should promote it and advance it.

A whole range of things are done to ensure services remain safe and sustainable because that is the absolute paramount duty of the health board.

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

It took 23 years from Abraxane being conceived to us showing now with conclusiveness that it works in pancreatic cancer. We cannot afford as a society to wait another 23 years to make sure that the patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.

With the Australian Government paying more of the hospital bills, it will have the incentive to make sure people are treated through less expensive and more appropriate primary care services.

Compared to the United States, physicians in Europe have a much more conservative approach to joint replacement in general.

If you put me in charge of the medical research budget, I would cancel all primary research, I would cancel all new trials, for just one year, and I would spend the money exclusively on making sure that we make the best possible use of the clinical evidence that we already have.

Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to foster better health outcomes, I am convinced physician behavior would change over time.

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

Healthcare providers will compete to offer the best record of patient safety at the lowest prices. Hospitals and patients will benefit from having accurate information about areas of excellence and areas that must be improved.

You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.

In order to improve healthcare, we'll have to spend more on it, increase accountability and decentralize services, enforce standards and reinstate people's faith in it.

It took us three years to even come close to catching up with the demand a little bit.

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.

My opinion has always been that when it comes to deciding where specialist centres should be located, whether they are regional or national specialities, it should be done on clinical grounds.

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.

As consumers are being asked to pay more of the cost of healthcare services, they will increasingly demand more value and will also ask for more transparency and tools to determine the value they are receiving.

With 'Gerald's Game' in particular, we didn't have enough money or time and it was really hard.

The issue comes down to this: The NSA metadata-collection program costs lots of money, and had funds not been expended on it, they could have been used to support other programs that might have been far more effective in saving American lives.

If you spend £200million, £300m every year, obviously, even if you make mistakes, you have a good team, but without spending so much money, you can still improve and do well.

In a majority of hospitals, in a majority of places, it is the nurses that are on the frontlines. They're the ones working every moment with the patients to ensure that they do well.

We have about 360,000 employees in the VA health care system. It's the largest health care system in the country. And the negative attention that's been put on VA has hurt the morale of our workforce. And so what we're trying to do is to get people to understand that we're doing great work every day.

With a lot of the things that seem scalable, you will find bottlenecks you never imagined that you suddenly need to find solutions for.

The thing that really sticks - and when you talk to entrepreneurs, they say the same - is just thinking about the next day, the next week.