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Healthcare providers will compete to offer the best record of patient safety at the lowest prices. Hospitals and patients will benefit from having accurate information about areas of excellence and areas that must be improved.

The best doctors and the best hospitals in America, if they cannot get the patient information they need when they need it, it can lead to morbid consequences: Higher mortality.

The high price of health care in this country is a serious issue that demands serious attention. Putting limits on damages have little or no effect on skyrocketing malpractice insurance rates.

Surgeons always underestimate the pain and disability involved in what they do to people.

Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely.

Here's where the insurance companies really fail us. They over-pay hospitals, specialists and drug companies and then raise premiums to cover the costs. Further, when they pay hospitals 115% of what it should cost to care for a patient, they are paying for inefficiency that can be dangerous.

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.

The best doctors and medicine in the world can't save you if you don't do what you're supposed to do.

I truly feel the best doctors are ones who are criticized by nurses, patients and family. They do not make excuses and learn from their mistakes.

Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.