Donald Berwick Quotes

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

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?

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.

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.

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

Everyone knows that my key drivers to moving health care policies is improving access and reducing costs and improving outcomes.

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

There is no question that managed care is managed cost, and the idea is that you can save a lot of money and make health care costs less if you ration it.

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.

Now, decisions with a major impact on health care are made in conjunction with budgetary decisions. Before we debated health policy. Now we debate fiscal policy.

Decisions about your health should be between you and your doctor, not a bureaucrat and an insurance company. Let's expand choice rather than limiting it. Let's create jobs instead of destroying them. And let's bring down the costs instead of driving them up.

I don't want doctors and patients to be having to - having to literally ration care, take away that relationship by having the government come in and interfere.

Although I believe deeply that the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Community Health Center program are invaluable, I reject the notion that we cannot reauthorize these programs without plundering other equally vital programs.

Where health care has failed is in designing a cost containment mechanism that works.

And so our goal on health care is, if we can get, instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year, it's going up at the level of inflation, maybe just slightly above inflation, we've made huge progress. And by the way, that is the single most important thing we could do in terms of reducing our deficit. That's why we did it.

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.

This idea of universal access to basic healthcare has to be figured out as a world. No country has figured it out in part because it is driven by ideology.

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

We need to be careful when we talk about cutting health care costs. They are not going to be reduced - what we really want to do is do is slow the rate of increase.

The average man with a need for an operation cannot afford a first class hospital …My medical pills run $400 to $500 a month and hell, I feel pretty good … Costs must be tempered..

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

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

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

In my opinion, real reform, which lowers costs and ensures all Americans get the quality, affordable health care that they deserve, cannot be accomplished without a robust public option.

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.