Medical Priorities Quotes

Ever since Katrina, there has been a proliferation of efforts at the state level and among hospital administrators to come up with guidelines that would help professionals stuck in a situation like this to prioritize patients. These are questions of values much more than they are of medicine or nursing. They're the province of everybody.

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.

Team doctors' jobs those days were to keep you on the field.

Under Medicare right now, I get paid to put a pacemaker in you, but I don't get paid to counsel you about end-of-life care.

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off.

What we should care about is health - reduction of morbidity and mortality. Too often, we instead pay attention to whether something is 'normal.' A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins, even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off.

We care a lot more about not having the disease than treating it.

I think it would be a great tragedy to devote medical resources and genetic technological breakthroughs to purposes that are not to do with health or medicine, but instead are to do with satisfying the desires that are created by the consumer society.

We spend billions on marginal and often unnecessary procedures on people who are in the final dying process, yet we leave millions of Americans out of the health insurance system, and America's kids have the worst dental health in the developed world.