Quotes About Healthcare

is difficult to be a patient for long without coming up against the hard truth that what you are searching for and what your doctor is offering are two entirely different things.

To have a poorly understood disease is to be brought up against every flaw in the U.S. health care system; to collide with the structural problems of a late-capitalist society that values productivity more than health; and to confront the philosophical problem of conveying an experience that lacks an accepted framework. Even

Like many in their baby boomer generation, they saw doctors as unquestionable experts. You didn't go to them unless you had a high fever or a bad fall or a wound that needed stitching. In that case, you got a diagnosis, you took medicine or had surgery, and you got better, more or less in that order. But if the doctor told you nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong. My parents believed in the power of Western medicine, and therefore so did I.

In Turkey, you're not allowed to be left alone in the hospital. The nurse teaches the family how to do things, and somebody is always there with the patient.

We are spending most of our time in American health care fixing the mistakes that either we in the profession are causing or our patients are, without recognizing it, causing to themselves.

You cannot drive a system that's going to be aiming at preventing illness if everyone is not in it. The whole gaming of health insurance and health care in America is based on that fundamental principle: insure people who aren't sick and you don't have to pay more money on them.

Were paying more for the privilege of getting sick and dying early. Once again, it makes no sense. And once again, no one in Washington is talking about how to fix it.

We cannot continue. Our pension costs and health care costs for our employees are going to bankrupt this city.

People use so much more health care when they live longer.

You have almost no chance to succeed, even in a meritocracy, if you don't have access to good schools or health insurance, cannot afford nutritious meals, fear for your physical safety, or lack broadband connectivity or devices for doing homework or participating in the economy.

When providers have to compete on results, the problem of supply-driven demand, in which available capacity leads to care with questionable benefits, will largely disappear.

From a strategic perspective, however, the issues in health care can be divided into three broad areas. The first is the cost of and access to health insurance. The second is standards for coverage, or the types of care that should be covered by insurance versus being the responsibility of the individual. The third is the structure of health care delivery itself.

The fundamental problem in the U.S. health care system is that the structure of health care delivery is broken. This is what all the data about rising costs and alarming quality are telling us. And the structure of health care delivery is broken because competition is broken. All of the well-intended reform movements have failed because they did not address the underlying nature of competition.

The only way to truly reform health care is to reform the nature of competition itself.

The way to transform health care is to realign competition with value for patients. Value in health care is the health outcome per dollar of cost expended. If all system participants have to compete on value, value will improve dramatically.

At the most basic level, competition in health care must take place where value is actually created.

Value in health care is determined in addressing the patient's particular medical condition over the full cycle of care, from monitoring and prevention to treatment to ongoing disease management.

For example, in intravenous (IV) solutions and kits for use in hospitals, procedures for attaching solutions to patients differ among competitive products and the hardware for hanging the IV bottles are not compatible. Here switching encounters great resistance from nurses responsible for administering the treatment and requires new investments in hardware.

The local bias in health care means that many providers offer services in which they lack the volume and experience to be truly excellent, and that excess capacity and the tendency for supply to create demand are almost guaranteed.

Per capita health care cost in the United States surpasses that of most other developed countries. Despite this, U.S. costs are rising at comparable rates.

U.S. consumers report higher dissatisfaction with their health care system than do consumers in other developed nations.

THE U.S. HEALTH CARE SYSTEM is on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors, and limited access to care.

Competition on value must revolve around results. The results that matter are patient outcomes per unit of cost at the medical condition level.

Competing on results requires that results be measured and made widely available. Only by measuring and holding every system participant accountable for results will the performance of the health care system ever be significantly improved.