At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care — if, that is, you're going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler.
When I get sick, I go to my doctor like everyone else. A doctor has powerful tools that may help me. Or those tools may hurt me, make me worse. I have to decide. It's my life. It's my responsibility.
Rand Paul and Chris Christie both said vaccinations should be a choice, not a government mandate. Because when have Republicans ever told people what they could do with their own bodies?
The death panel issue arose with Tom Daschle, who was originally going to be the Health Czar. Daschle became enamored with the British system and wrote a book about health care, which influenced President [Barack] Obama.
No woman wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.
Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.
Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured.
We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart, consumerist choices about their own health care.
A woman in the audience asked [Barack] Obama about her mother. Her mother was 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States.
I would like to maximize the level of human choice in the medical field...The choice of a treatment in many ways is like the exercise of religion.
It is a good idea to 'shop around' before you settle on a doctor. Ask about the condition of his Mercedes. Ask about the competence of his mechanic. Don't be shy! After all, you're paying for it.
Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government should continue to pay for your health.
Americans have the right to have their medical decisions made by them and their doctors, and not by those bureaucrats sitting behind a computer screen hundreds of miles away.
If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.
I know a lot of people in Washington would say, well, you know, indigent people can't manage their health savings account. They're too stupid. But they're not too stupid. Somebody has a diabetic foot ulcer, they learn very quickly not to go the emergency room where it costs five times more to take care of it. They go to the clinic.
If you don't want to use your tax credit to go by health insurance, you don't have to. If you don't want to buy this plan, you want to buy that plan, go for it, it's your choice. It's called freedom. It's called free market health care.
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.
The last decision I made was my health when I had a heart attack when I was 51.
The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference
The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we're likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we're forced to make difficult choices about our parents, other loved ones, or even ourselves that ultimately boil down to calculations of worth and value.
Women are the primary healthcare consumers in the country. 80 percent of all healthcare decisions are made by women.
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.
In the past, much power and responsibility over life and death was concentrated in the hands of doctors. Now, this ethical burden is increasingly shared by the builders of AI software.
I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.
