Donald Berwick Quotes

Medical professionals, not insurance company bureaucrats, should be making health care decisions.

My job as a physician is to make sure I have provided my patients with the best options to make the decisions that affect their lives.

Competition makes things come out right. Well, what does that mean in health care? More hospitals so they compete with each other. More doctors compete with each other. More pharmaceutical companies. We set up war. Wait a minute, let's talk about the patient. The patient doesn't need a war.

There's a culture inside the NHS that is highly paternalistic. You know, 'We give them the service and they are grateful.' We have to move to shared decision-making.

We will empower patients as well as health professionals. We will disempower the hierarchy and bureaucracy.

We all want more information available when making health care decisions for ourselves and our families.

The fact of the matter is right now politicians and insurance companies are making decisions. We're saying we want doctors to be making decisions. And I think that will lead to a higher-quality, lower-cost system over time.

As patients and consumers, we are better informed today about our health care than any previous generation.

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

People spending more of their own money on routine health care would make the system more competitive and transparent and restore the confidence between the patients and the doctors without government rationing.

America enjoys the best health care in the world, but the best is no good if folks can't afford it, access it and doctor's can't provide it.

You should be able to choose which hospital you go to.

A modern health and social care system has to be completely focussed on the needs of its users.

Health care in America, despite all you hear, still offers us citizens one of the most efficient and highest quality systems in the world. But it's expensive, and it's only getting worse.

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.

To do health care was a noble, good thing, and it will help America dramatically. I don't begrudge Barack Obama choosing it, even though if I were president, I might not have.

We can only imagine what would happen to our health care and to the quality of our health care here in North Dakota if we took the federal government out of health care.

The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.

I have young kids. The fiscal burden that will be imposed on them is going to depend primarily on whether we tackle this looming problem in our health care system - with rising costs that don't seem, by the way, to be necessarily associated with higher quality. That is the key burden that they will face.

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

Ultimately, health care fails the most basic test. It's not organized around the needs of the patient.

There's a lot of arrogance in the medical community. There are good, reliable websites you can go to for information - the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins.

I'm strongly for a patient Bill of Rights. Decisions ought to be made by doctors, not accountants.

One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.

I don't necessarily want my physician making all my decisions.