healthcare priorities Quotes

Unfortunately, in rich-world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We're inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation?

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care.

Though fancy may be the patient's complaint, necessity is often the doctor's.

Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, small pox and malaria.

The federal investment in finding cures for cancer - $3 billion annually [as of 1999] - is less than ... zero ... point ... zero ... zero ... zero ... four ... percent of our gross domestic product, or about one-seventh of what Americans spend on beauty products.

Health is more important than anything.

In an underdeveloped society, the first anxiety is of infant mortality. In an advanced one it is to keep alive the aged.

The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.

Literature doesn't matter! The only thing that matters is money and getting your teeth fixed!

Medicare will pay for Viagra but they won’t for eyeglasses. They give you a hardon, but they won’t let you see where to put it.

Every penny paid to a PFI company is money withdrawn from those waiting for an operation, money removed from the training of clinicians, and money denied for life-saving treatments.

The medical device tags that are being used [in the USA] are a terrible mistake. Why are we taxing people for trying to save lives and trying to make lives better, make peoples lives healthier? Those taxes should be placed on alcohol, tobacco, junk food, guns. Those are all the things that destroy health.

Why give chemotherapy or even antibiotics to people with end-stage Alzheimer's disease? Keep them pain free and clean, love them but don't automatically try to get the last technology-produced breath from them. Start a preschool program instead or do something about the atrocious state of obesity in our children.

In medicine, we spend billions each year on doing and a fraction of that amount on listening and reflecting.

Immigration is not the top issue for Latinos. Latinos are like every other American - economy, jobs, healthcare, education.

You do not have to cut finds from the elderly sick and still keep the yacht subsidy;

There are so few drugs for these killer diseases, but for erectile dysfunction, we have had 14 drugs since 1996… It says something about where the priorities of the pharmaceutical companies seem to lie.

Charles Murray, however, clearly believes that being able to cure fatal diseases is more important than some other things and that Rembrandt was a greater artist than your local sidewalk cartoon sketcher. Most people might regard this as obvious common sense but some of the intelligentsia may be seething with resentment at seeing their pet fetishes ignored.

I talked to over two hundred patients and family members about their experiences with aging, serious illnesses, and the big unfixables. But I also spoke with scores of physicians, and especially geriatricians, palliative care doctors, hospice nurses, and nursing home workers. The biggest thing I found was that when these clinicians were at their best, they were recognizing that people had priorities besides merely living longer. The most important and reliable way that we can understand what people's priorities are, besides just living longer, is to simply ask. And we don't ask.

Legislation is about three fundamental things - affordability, access, and quality. That's what the American people want.

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

If you hurt your knee, honestly, I'd rather have the federal government focused on North Korea, focused on other things than your knee, OK, or than your back, as important as your back is. I would much rather see the federal government focused on other things, bigger things.