Primary Care Quotes

The world cannot continue to build larger health care systems where you just sit around and wait for people to get sick.

The goal should be universal, guaranteed, high-quality health care.

I took action to allow Montanans to participate in direct primary care agreements with doctors and authorized the use of health care sharing ministries, both of which provide alternatives for more affordable health care.

My doctor is a family physician. He treats my family and I support his.

I was at Harvard Medical School and there were not a lot of, kind of, community health options, and I wound up at - sort of in Harvard Community Health Center for various reasons.

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.

The fact is, many poor patients visit ERs simply because they don't have a family doctor.

Universal coverage is a critical goal, but even if every man and woman, every parent and every child in America woke up with an insurance card in their hands, they would still need a place to go for health care.

A prevention-based society is one in which every institution, whether they're a hospital or a clinic, or a school, an employer or a faith-based organization, recognizes and embraces the role that it can play in improving health.

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...

The traditional way that society looks at healthcare is to let people get terribly sick and then have an emergency room to take care of them and spend a lot of money on acute care for people who would have been kept out of hospital in the first place if they had had a lifestyle change.

What Americans desperately need is a way to transition from the current system - which is fragmented and focuses on high-cost, high-tech interventions after illness strikes - to a modern system that delivers coordinated, high-touch, lower-cost, patient-centered care with an emphasis on primary care and prevention.

If we have the right preventive and primary care, if we start charging for comprehensive care in the chronic cases, 10 percent of the cases take up two-thirds of the medical expenses, and if we do more on problems like childhood obesity, that we can, to use the parlance that's popular in Washington, bend the cost curve and eventually reconcile this so our costs will be closer to our competitors and so we can cover everybody.

Look, if you have somebody who doesn't have health insurance, who doesn't have a doctor or dentist, and in order to deal with their cold or flu or dental problem, they go to an emergency room - in general, that visit will cost ten times more than walking into a community health center.

Preventive medicine isn't part of a physician's everyday routine, which is spent dispensing drugs and performing surgery.

We have an unprecedented number of primary care doctors who are opting out of Medicare.

In the Affordable Care Act, Congress provided access to medical care for nearly 30 million uninsured Americans. Access is critically important, but offering access to an already broken system won't provide a lasting cure. We need to ask and answer the underlying question: Access to what?

It doesn't take a brain surgeon... or a cardiologist... or a pediatrician... or even a policy wonk to figure out that a penny's worth of preventive care is worth many dollars of sick care.

Since the reduction of risk factors is the scientific basis for primary prevention, the World Health Organization promotes the development of an integrated strategy for prevention of several diseases, rather than focusing on individual ones.

Making sure that people have access to preventive medicine for the first time ever as a nation? That's a big deal.

Care shouldn't start in the emergency room.

As many citizens can attest, the U.S. is a great place to get sick, but a terrible place to stay well. This requires a shift in the way both doctors and patients approach health maintenance and disease prevention.

If a woman goes to Planned Parenthood for birth control and discovers in the course of her visit that she has high blood pressure, Planned Parenthood can't help her. She has to be referred to a FQHC for treatment.

Getting the care for a common cold, migraine, or high blood pressure can and should be easy, whether one has an insurance card or not.

In 1979, just after I became governor, I asked Hillary to chair a rural health committee to help expand health care to isolated farm and mountain areas. They recommended to do that partly by deploying trained nurse practitioners in places with no doctors to provide primary care they were trained to provide.