Leo Varadkar Quotes

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

People have been talking about competition among insurers, and what they really need to be talking about is competition in the delivery of health care as well.

In other industries, value is defined by the ultimate stakeholder - the one who benefits, or not, from the service. We should do the same in medicine.

While closing our innovation gaps won't solve all our problems, we have some very real opportunities to improve the quality of care that's delivered to millions of Americans.

If, over time, patients don't go to some services, then progressively they become less viable, so you do arrive at a point where the conclusion is: 'These are the right services for the future, and this is capacity we don't need.'

We see healthcare shifting from a procedure reimbursement, where in this country doctors are reimbursed for how many procedures they conduct, to a world where people will be reimbursed for the outcomes - did the patient actually get better, and what was the total cost of the cycle of care.

In the U.S., hospitals are rewarded for keeping hospital beds full. That's the market at work. The question is: should we work for the market, or should the market work for us?

I've operated on people from Canada that have come to Wyoming for me to take care of them because they couldn't afford to wait long enough for their free operation.

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.

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.

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

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

We want to make sure that we incentivize the health care system to be designed to provide you the best quality health care possible.

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.

By redesigning our health care system, we are participating in one of the greatest social experiments in American history.

Our healthcare system has seen some of the greatest achievements of the human intellect since we started recording history: We're developing incredible devices and implantables to improve the quantity and quality of people's lives.

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.

I remain deeply interested in the transformation of the American healthcare system to improve quality and contain costs.

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.

The truth is that the greatest innovations in health-care delivery haven't come from federally contrived oligopolies or enormous hospital chains. Novel concepts - whether practice-management companies, home health care or the first for-profit HMO - almost always have come from entrepreneurial firms, often backed by venture capital.

Our biggest achievement was health-sector reform. The success was in making sure that primary health care was the center of gravity in our health system.

I do think that VA, as the largest employer of nurses and the largest health system in the country, often does become a place where we can demonstrate advances in medical practice.

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.

Our rural communities are the heart of Maine, and we must invest in them - building our energy infrastructure, expanding access to broadband, and most importantly, making sure every single person has access to the health care they need.

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.