60 Quotes by Ezekiel Emanuel

Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life... Indeed, many physicians were willing to lie to get patients what they needed from insurance companies that were trying to hold down costs.

Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely lipstick cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change. Savings will require changing how doctors think about their patients. Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.

Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others

Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.

Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child’s death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.

I’m the son of a pediatrician, and I do believe that the most important resource we have is our kids. And I think the most important thing for America’s future is to invest more in our children.

We don’t have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose.

Having been an oncologist and having cared for scores, if not hundreds, of dying patients, when you don’t have a treatment that can shrink the tumor and the patient will die, it’s a very difficult conversation. It’s emotionally draining.