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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The vast majority of doctors really do try to take the money out of their minds. But to provide the best possible care requires using resources in a way that keeps you viable but improves the quality of care.
For the amount of money that the country is going to spend this year on health care, you can go out and hire a doctor for every seven families in the US and pay the doctor almost $230,000 a year to cover them.
Insurance companies pay big bucks for procedures but next to nothing for patient consultations and preventive medicine, which is what most medicine is.
Funding that is focused on the ability to diagnose diseases precisely will just have inestimable value because that's the gate through which precision medicine has to go. Unless you can diagnose the disease precisely, care has to remain in the hands of expensive institutions and expensive caregivers.
The best way to reduce the cost of medical care is to reduce the illness.
People say that the most expensive piece of medical equipment is the doctor's pen. It's not that we make all the money. It's that we order all the money.
Safe care saves lives and saves money. Adverse events like high levels of infection, blood clots or falls in hospital, emergency readmissions and pressure sores cost the NHS billions of pounds every year. There is a serious human cost, too, with patients ending up injured, or even dead. Most are avoidable with the right care.
In the sick room, ten cents' worth of human understanding equals ten dollars' worth of medical science.
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait 'til it's free.
In health care today, we spend most of the dollars - in terms of treating disease - in the last two years of a person's life.