Alex Azar Quotes

The real cure for what ails our health care system today is less government and more freedom.

As a small-business owner who kept costs low and health care premiums flat for 10 years in my company, I know firsthand that transparency is the trick to reducing the skyrocketing health care costs that are burdening patients, employers, and our state, local, and federal governments.

We do not have a functioning market in the true sense of the word in health care. That's a layer of transparency that's sorely needed in America.

A modern health and social care system has to be completely focussed on the needs of its users.

If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that's not going to promote healthiness.

Ultimately, health care fails the most basic test. It's not organized around the needs of the patient.

Supported by digital data, new data-driven tools, and payment policies that reward improving the quality and value of care, doctors, hospitals, patients, and entrepreneurs across the nation are demonstrating that smarter, better, more accessible, and more proactive care is the best way to improve quality and control health care costs.

I think we do better as a country when we go step by step toward a goal, and the goal in this case should be reducing health care costs.

How do we crate a quality health care system that is universal?

With health care, despite the fact that we as a nation have already chosen to provide health care in one form or another to everyone, we have, until Obamacare, chosen to pick the least cost-effective means, a mix of private and public offerings, of providing that care. That makes no sense.

We need more access to quality health care, not less.

What we're really trying to do is level out the health care system. It has gotten so one-sided as more and more people have been put into managed care; in fact, about 70 percent of the patients in the country.

With more than 1,300 sites of care, VA operates the largest integrated health care system in the county.

In my book, 'Let Patients Help,' one chapter is titled 'Let patients vote on what's worth the cost.' That's sensible, right? In other industries, consumer preference is a key determinant in prices.

If we're going to be able to provide access to quality, affordable health care to every American - we need to have the trained health care professionals inside hospitals to provide that care.

I'm not saying we don't need health care reform. We do need health care reform.

Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs - a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.

In the U.S., hospitals are rewarded for keeping hospital beds full. That's the market at work. The question is: should we work for the market, or should the market work for us?

Having come from the U.S. and observed the way the health care system works there, we definitely felt that we could do something in India.

The quality of health care in Canada is excellent.

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.

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.

I don't think the American people want unilateral government control over the entire health-care system.

I entered the health care debate in response to a statement in the United States press in summer 2009 which claimed the National Health Service in Great Britain would have killed me off, were I a British citizen. I felt compelled to make a statement to explain the error.