Quote

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.

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.

In an ideal world, the amount of money we spend on medical research to prevent or cure a disease would be proportional to its seriousness and the number of people who suffer from it.

In the real world, 90% of the money spent on medical research is focused on conditions that are responsible for just 10% of the deaths and disability caused by diseases globally.

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.

I think that I know the value of a dollar.

Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.

I'm doing my work in an environment that's ultimately about dollars and cents.

As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.

Value in medicine depends on information - as I said in 'Let Patients Help,' 'People perform better when they're informed better.' It follows that to make patients and families more effective in care, they need to know more.