Quotes About Healthcare

Libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened. If people want to smoke cigarettes, to eat a lot of candy, to choose an unsuitable health care plan, or to fail to save for retirement, libertarian paternalists will not force them to do otherwise—

As we will soon see, it is not clear that patients gain a lot from the right to sue. At the same time, part of the current cost is passed onto patients, in the form of higher bills, and defensive medicine can be bad medicine for those who want good care.

Choice architecture in domains from human resource departments to social security to health care must use some combination of curation and navigation tools. If they don't, people will flounder. As we have mentioned, some people have a simple philosophy: Just Maximize Choices. That's not always a bad idea, but it can be problematic without sophisticated choice architecture tools. Instead, a well-curated small selection and/or a good default can produce quite satisfactory outcomes.

Our principal claim here is that patients and doctors should be free to make their own agreements about that right. If patients want to waive the right to sue, they should be allowed to do exactly that. This increase in freedom is likely to help doctors and patients alike, and to make a valuable, even if modest, contribution to the health care problem.

The blessing of endless information: the Internet, democratizing even health care. Suppose we gave all pharmaceuticals an Amazon rating. The wisdom of crowds. Do away with experts altogether.

I know you have this idea that a surgical mask and gown are all you need to handle an Ebola patient, but I think you need to use a higher level of containment," and he offered to pick up the sick man in an Army ambulance—put him in an Army biocontainment pod—and carry the pod to the Army's facilities at the Institute.

the family of filoviruses comprised Marburg along with two types of a virus called Ebola. The Ebolas were named Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Marburg was the mildest of the three filovirus sisters. The worst of them was Ebola Zaire. The kill rate in humans infected with Ebola Zaire is nine out of ten. Ninety percent of the people who come down with Ebola Zaire die of it. Ebola Zaire is a slate wiper in humans.

According to standard doctrine, there are basically three ways to stop a virus—vaccines, drugs, and biocontainment. There was no vaccine for Ebola. There was no drug treatment for Ebola. That left only biocontainment.

staff. A characteristic of a lethal, contagious, and incurable virus is that it quickly gets into the medical people.

In a culture like ours, still preoccupied with security issues, enormously high military budgets are never seriously questioned by Congress or by the people, while appropriations reflecting later stages in the hierarchy of needs, like those for education, health care for the poor, and the arts, are quickly cut, if even considered. The message is clear that we are largely an adolescent culture.

The nurse who came in to take her blood was the same one who'd taken her blood pressure earlier, and she slapped the flesh on Miss Beryl's arm with some annoyance, as if she'd have preferred it to assume some other shape. Miss Beryl knew just how the woman felt.

The novelty of hospital visiting was being slowly replaced by the fatigue of hospital visiting.

The death rate for that is 8.8 women per 100,000.12 As I've mentioned before, continuing a pregnancy is 12 to 14 times as potentially fatal as ending it. That means abortion is always potentially lifesaving for a pregnant woman. (And getting more so, because the maternal mortality rate is rising in the US even as it is falling around the world.)

It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.

Everybody is on something these days. It's a racket. Overprescribing, masking the problem.

Is it experimental?" "All medicine is experimental. All therapies work on some patients but not on others. You must listen to what I tell you: medicine offers no guarantees.

Its job was to arrange the painless deaths of handicapped people who could not survive without costly care. It had done splendid work in the last couple of years, disposing of tens of thousands of useless people. The problem was that German public opinion was not yet sophisticated enough to understand the need for such deaths, so the program had to be kept quiet.

Prior Godwyn came in to see the patients. He refused to wear the face mask, saying it was women's nonsense. He made the same diagnosis as before, overheated blood, and prescribed bleeding and a diet of sour apples and ram's tripe.

What a Life: Give some of us pills to stop a fit, give the rest shock to start one.

And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly.

Not to employ prayer with my patients was the equivalent of deliberately withholding a potent drug or surgical procedure.

I suppose the doctor-patient relationship has that idea of transference. I think it's a special thing that doctors have. We all find doctors sexy. That's why there are so many TV shows about doctors.

Traditional medical ethics, based on the doctor-patient relationship must be changed... The primary function of health care regulations should be to limit an individuals own decision-making!

Government health care changes the relationship between the citizen and the state, and, in fact, I think it's an assault on citizenship.