Notice: ob_end_flush(): Failed to delete and flush buffer. No buffer to delete or flush in /home1/ntptuqmy/public_html/quotes/includes/header_html.php on line 6 Atul Gawande Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database
Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage.
If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my patients will not even be postponed. Another surgeon would step in and take over. The reason to do research and writing is that it at least makes me feel not entirely replaceable. If I didn't write, I don't know if I would do surgery.
No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.
I'm floating between multiple media. I really wish you could buy the hardcover book and it would come with the digital download and audible version. I spend stupid amounts of money because I'm usually buying my books in at least two formats.
I believe that one version of the good in life can be defined by the moments I sometimes had playing tennis as a sixteen-year-old. You'd be out on the court and for an hour, two hours, sometimes an entire roasting hot day, and every single thing you hit would go in. Hit that ball as hard as you wanted, wherever you wanted, and it went in.
Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.
There are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not. Universal health-care coverage belongs to the first category: you can pick one of several possible solutions, pass a bill, and (allowing for some tinkering around the edges) it will happen.
We now live in the era of the super-specialist - of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn't.
Most people are squeamish about saying how much they earn, but in medicine the situation seems especially fraught. Doctors aren't supposed to be in it for the money, and the more concerned a doctor seems to be about making money the more suspicious people become about the care being provided.
Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice.
Health care confronts us with a difficult test. We have never corrected failure in something so deeply embedded in people's lives and in the economy without the pressure of an outright crisis.
Our health-care morass is like the problems of global warming and the national debt - the kind of vast policy failure that is far easier to get into than to get out of. Americans say that they want leaders who will take on these problems.
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.
The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the United States, most don't.
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.
