Clayton Christensen Quotes

We have a system that's really founded on profit and on selling pharmaceuticals as opposed to keeping people healthy and then helping them get back to health.

We now have 30 percent, for example, of Medicare patients who are seeing doctors who are rewarded for doing this kind of work, like high blood pressure control. So, the Affordable Care Act has pushed this direction down the road.

We have an opportunity to create a future where we are actually encouraging providers to keep people away from acute care, whenever possible.

Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.

The stronger ties between primary care providers and the patients they serve will produce better outcomes and allow for more sustainable healthcare spending.

I think the problem with the country is that we operate on a sickness model, not a wellness model... Basically, we treat people who become ill. What we don't do is do a very good job in keeping them healthy in the first place...

If we can keep you healthy, that is better. If you fall sick, you go to the hospital. Both sides, Philips is present.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

Go back to the '30s, '40s, '50s, and it was the discovery of heroic interventions, the ability to cure people with penicillin or do an operation to stop disease that was what saved the day. Primary care physicians couldn't do all that much that really demonstrated a difference. The people who control and work with you to control your blood pressure, they're not rewarded for doing that or to be innovative about doing that. So, the result is half of Americans have uncontrolled high blood pressure, despite seeing clinicians.

We currently have a system for taking care of sickness. We do not have a system for enhancing and promoting health.

Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all of the time

The patient is the nucleus of the health care system.

Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.

What we have in the United States is not so much a health-care system as a disease-care system.

Wellness is cheaper than illness. It costs us time and money when children get sick.

Poor health is not caused by something you don't have; it's caused by disturbing something that you already have. Health is not something you need to get, it's something you have already if you don't disturb it.

I grew up with a lot of dinner table conversations about health care and ways in which the system was inadequate for the needs of many of the patients they took care of.

You cannot buy your health; you must earn it through healthy living.

We're not going to have you burdening the health system.

The big thing that's happened is, in the time since the Affordable Care Act has been going on, our medical science has been advancing. We have now genomic data. We have the power of big data about what your living patterns are, what's happening in your body. Even your smartphone can collect data about your walking or your pulse or other things that could be incredibly meaningful in being able to predict whether you have disease coming in the future and help avert those problems.

Medicine, likewise, because it deals with things, has always been for our serener circles a Cinderella, blooming maid as happily as she has grown nevertheless.

Health is like money, we never have a true idea of its value until we lose it.

Why don't we just get our population healthier so we don't need medical care?

I hope the new health care exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act will provide some help.

It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen