The big thing that's happened is, in the time since the Affordable Care Act has been going on, our medical science has been advancing. We have now genomic data. We have the power of big data about what your living patterns are, what's happening in your body. Even your smartphone can collect data about your walking or your pulse or other things that could be incredibly meaningful in being able to predict whether you have disease coming in the future and help avert those problems.

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.

We recruit for attitude and train for skill.

In psychology, there's something called the broken-leg problem. A statistical formula may be highly successful in predicting whether or not a person will go to a movie in the next week. But someone who knows that this person is laid up with a broken leg will beat the formula. No formula can take into account the infinite range of such exceptional events.

Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.

Our ideas of what our priorities are shift as we come face-to-face with some of the struggles.

The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.