What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.

One of the consequences of if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, is that all of us now are at risk of being a preexisting - of having a preexisting condition waiting to happen. Life, increasingly, is a preexisting condition waiting to happen, now that we have more and more of this data available.

Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.

Once you start to ask patients about their priorities, you discover what they're living for. Once you uncover that, it helps you, as a doctor, decide what to fight for. And when we do that, we often end up identifying limits to the kind of care that people want. One's assumption is that these people are going to live shorter lives, but what we're doing is protecting quality of life. In doing so, you sometimes end up helping people live longer. Certainly, you help people live better days and with more purpose in their lives.

Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are usually in a poor position to fix them.

As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.