Dave deBronkart Quotes

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.

We need to transform our system so people know what they are paying for health care, so they know whether they are getting good quality health care, and so they have a reason and ability to care.

The right way to reign in healthcare costs is not by applying more government and more controls and making it more like the post office, it's by making it more like a consumer-driven market.

Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs - a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.

Health care's like any other product or service: if the consumer is in charge of spending his money on it, then the market will make sure that it is affordable.

Reversing the escalation of health care costs is going to need more than legislation, yet it can be done without imposing rationing, as critics of reform fear.

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

As long as gas is cheaper than bottled water, we can't be in a position of dictating to the consumer what to buy.

Please, let patients help improve healthcare. Let patients help steer our decisions, strategic and practical. Let patients help define what value in medicine is.

The dictates of economics, that "dismal science," limit the benefits of medical science

We purchase goods from abroad because they are obviously better or cheaper than the goods we have at home …. It’s basically a choice of the American people of what we want to do with our purchasing power.

The pharma pricing system was not built on the idea of consumer engagement. It was built... on market efficiencies. It was not built on the premise of consumerism.

I want to give consumers way more choices in health care. Choice and competition always drive down costs better than central control.

Competition in our health system is a powerful force of cost-containment.

Armed with pricing information, health care consumers can punish providers that price gouge, waste resources, or engage in surprise billing by taking their business elsewhere.

Health care costs are on the rise because the consumers are not involved in the decision-making process. Most health care costs are covered by third parties. And therefore, the actual user of health care is not the purchaser of health care. And there's no market forces involved with health care.

Medicare is expensive because we spend a lot on healthcare. We spend a lot on healthcare basically just because we want to, and doing so has been very good to a lot of people who work in healthcare fields.

The consumer is really underutilized in health care.

Price creates incentive, and energy will be developed if there's demand for it at the price you can develop it.

Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different.

If people don't want it, they won't have it.

Are you free? Yes, you are free to bow to the dictates of the market.

Free enterprise picks investments successfully by running millions of experiments, and the survival of a product depends on its producing more value per dollar of cost than other products do. Competition ruthlessly prunes products that fail to meet this threshold. The public sector works in the opposite way; it undertakes large investment with virtually no competition.

I really don't want the best people at the highest cost.

Actually, in my advanced, high-falutin' frontier economics, I often work with what I define as 'money metric utility,' and I ask people, 'Do you really want that? What are you willing to pay for that?'