Quote

Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.

Because you want to have competition to drive down the price. You want innovation. You have the ability to get people to agree that it's worth having a public plan. You could get private insurers to cover this population, but you couldn't without giving the population leverage in the marketplace.

I loved clinical practice, but in public health, you can impact more than one person at a time. The whole society is your patient.

People spending more of their own money on routine health care would make the system more competitive and transparent and restore the confidence between the patients and the doctors without government rationing.

The 2 million people who work in the NHS and social care are also themselves patients and users. I know they all want to treat patients and users the way they and their families would want to be treated and that is the purpose of our reforms.

We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society.

I prefer to think of the audience as a single living organism with which I am sharing a singular, never-to-be-repeated experience.

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.

Today we see a human population of over 6 billion people, many of whom have serious medical conditions, which either can't be treated or cannot be treated economically.