Quote

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.

We are paying the price for living longer, collecting degenerative diseases along the way. Cancer is only one. Others are heart and brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinsons.

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.

I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.

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.

I'm no health care expert, but you've got technology that constantly advances the ability to extend life and maybe improve lifestyle. That puts constant upward pressure on health care costs.

We've gone from a preponderance of acute and infectious disease as a source of premature death to chronic diseases, which are the preponderance of the burden of illness in most of the world. That puts a much higher premium on the prevention of chronic disease than ever in history.

Health care's like any other product or service: if the consumer is in charge of spending his money on it, then the market will make sure that it is affordable.

A lot of medicines are not there to cure diseases. That's fine - drugs that keep people alive who wouldn't otherwise be alive are useful. What I object to is the drug companies' advertising, which you see everywhere in the U.S., which claims that they are curing diseases when they're not.

In addition to relieving patient suffering, research is needed to help reduce the enormous economic and social burdens posed by chronic diseases such as osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, cancer, heart disease, and stroke.