Heidi Murkoff Quotes

Human beings tend not to spend money on health preventionally. We tend to spend it on top treatment.

The world cannot continue to build larger health care systems where you just sit around and wait for people to get sick.

If insurance companies paid for lifestyle-management classes, they would save huge sums of money. We need to see that alternative medicine is now mainstream.

Hospitals should be paid to keep patients out of the hospital, not for signing up more and more patients.

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.

I want to drive down health care costs.

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

As a practicing neurologist, I place central importance in applying current science to the notion of disease prevention.

We've been paying for 100 percent of preventive care. But if you're not getting annual physicals, then you're not going to gain a financial incentive, so effectively your insurance premium with us will go up.

Vaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare.

The wellness and prevention market will outgrow the health care market.

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.

Each and every day health centers provide high-quality primary and preventive care to our constituents.

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.

Good access to a doctor and a drugstore when you first have a problem can avoid a lot of cost and heartache later.

One of the best aspects of health care reform is it starts to emphasize prevention.

I think that that's the wisest thing - to prevent illness before we try to cure something.

If we are going to get a grip on escalating costs, we have to focus more on prevention rather than acute care. Technology can help us do that.

I'm a preventative doctor.

A prevention-based society is one in which every institution, whether they're a hospital or a clinic, or a school, an employer or a faith-based organization, recognizes and embraces the role that it can play in improving health.

One fateful morning, I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that I shouldn't be operating on patients and then teaching them to eat to avoid me in the future; I should teach them to eat so that I wouldn't have to operate on them in the first place!

Let's face it, in America today we don't have a health care system, we have a sick care system. We wait until people become obese, develop chronic diseases, or become disabled - and then we spend untold hundreds of billions annually to try to make them better.

The best way to reduce the cost of medical care is to reduce the illness.

If my colleagues stop eating donuts and are more active, it saves me money on next year's insurance premium, and I get to work with people who have more energy and creativity each day. Yet most organizations fail to make health a cultural priority. Instead, they treat healthcare like any other expense.

What I think a doctor should do is prevent disease, by any means necessary.