Stephen J. Dubner Quotes

Doctors and hospitals should be paid for keeping their patients well. Paying them for doing more tests and surgeries creates bad incentives.

Physicians today, as human beings, are not exempt from the perverse economic pressures created by fee-for-service regimes to see more patients for shorter appointments and order more tests and procedures. If the incentives were changed to pay to foster better health outcomes, I am convinced physician behavior would change over time.

The 'find it, fix it 'model of medicine doesn't work any more. The U.S. healthcare system is bankrupting the country, bankrolling the insurance companies and exhausting healthcare staff. And despite all that, we are ranked 50th in the world for life expectancy.

Hospitals should be paid to keep patients out of the hospital, not for signing up more and more patients.

Medical costs are soaring because our health-care system is totally screwed up. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures.

For-profit does not belong in a taxpayer-funded health system. For-profit means cutting medical services to patients, and payments to providers, to preserve profits.

I have to tell you as a doctor, 25 years of practice, not as a politician using talking points, as somebody who has taken care of Medicare patients, we can make it a lot better.

As America becomes an older nation, it is also, by some measures, becoming sicker.

Competition makes things come out right. Well, what does that mean in health care? More hospitals so they compete with each other. More doctors compete with each other. More pharmaceutical companies. We set up war. Wait a minute, let's talk about the patient. The patient doesn't need a war.

Insurance companies pay big bucks for procedures but next to nothing for patient consultations and preventive medicine, which is what most medicine is.

The NHS should be proactively using substantial resources across government to intervene and try to deliver positive improvements in people's standards of living.

Having insurance doesn't guarantee good health outcomes, but it is a critical factor.

I think doctors are really suffering now. They're suffering in the sense that they feel torn between serving their patients in the best way they can and dealing with all of requirements of the insurance companies and the HMOs and the hassles and the paper work and the increasing pressures to do less and less for their patients.

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.

I think one of the most underreported and untouted benefits of the Affordable Care Act is the real investments we are finally making in this country in prevention.

Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable.

Let's make health care a meritocracy. Access to the best care goes to people who did what they could to avoid becoming ill.

We want to make sure that we incentivize the health care system to be designed to provide you the best quality health care possible.

I've been to enough other countries in the world to know what happens when you have socialized single-payer health care. It works. People don't get sick as much. They don't lose their life savings with a catastrophic illness like cancer or AIDS.

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.

Care shouldn't start in the emergency room.

Studies have indicated there is a strong correlation between the shortages of nurses and morbidity and mortality rates in our hospitals.

I don't understand, given the constraints physicians have in doing their job and the paperwork demanded of them, why people want to be physicians. I think we've made it very, very difficult for them to perform their job. I think that's a shame.

Insurance companies, whether private or government owned, must be compelled to pay for health-promoting measures. In turn, this will encourage physicians to offer such treatments in earnest.

There should be choice in healthcare.