Q So as we say, all of this is "How does this affect me?" And we want to get to your questions, and I want to start with Dr. Orrin Devinsky, is he here? Dr. Devinsky.
Q Yes, in the past, politicians who have sought to reform health care have tried to limit costs by reducing tests, access to specialists. But they've not been good at taking their own medicine. When they or their family members get sick they often get extremely expensive evaluations and expert care. If a national health plan was approved and your family participated -- and President Obama, if your wife or your daughter became seriously ill and things were not going well, and the plan physicians told you they were doing everything that reasonably could be done, and you sought out opinions from some medical leaders in major centers and they said there's another option that you should pursue, but it was not covered in the plan, would you potentially sacrifice the health of your family for the greater good of insuring millions, or would you do everything you possibly could as a father and husband to get the best health care and outcome for your family?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, Doctor, I think it's a terrific question, and it's something that touches us all personally, especially when you start talking about end-of-life care. Some of you know my grandmother recently passed away, which was a very painful thing for me. She's somebody who helped raise me. But she's somebody who contracted what was diagnosed as terminal cancer; there was unanimity about that. They expected that she'd have six to nine months to life. She fell and broke her hip. And then the question was, does she get hip replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough that they weren't sure how long she would last, whether she could get through the surgery.
I think families all across America are going through decisions like that all the time. And you're absolutely right that if it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.
But here's the problem that we have in our current health care system, is that there is a whole bunch of care that's being provided that every study, every bit of evidence that we have, indicates may not be making us healthier.
Q But you don't know what that test is.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, oftentimes we do, though. There are going to be situations where there are going to disagreements among experts. But oftentimes we do know what makes sense and what doesn't. And this is just one aspect of what is a broader issue. And if I could just pull back just for a second.
Understand that the status quo is untenable, which is why you saw, even though we've got Republicans, Democrats, independents, people from all parts of the health care sector represented here, everybody understands we can't keep doing what we're doing. It is bankrupting families. I get letters every single day from people who've worked hard and don't have health insurance. It is bankrupting businesses who are frustrated that they can't provide the same kind of insurance that they used to provide to their employees. And it's bankrupting our government at the state and federal levels.
So we know things are going to have to change. One aspect of it, the doctor identified, is can we come up with ways that don't prevent people from getting the care they need but also make sure that, because of all kinds of skewed incentives we are getting a lot of quantity of care but we're not getting the kind of quality that we need.
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