Life Is Choices, And They Are Relentless.

My Own Son Has A Congenital Heart Condition, Where His Life Was Saved By A Cardiac Surgeon Stepping In At 11 Days Of Life To Save His Life. But He Is Now 21 Years Old Because Of Constant Monitoring And Working With Him With A Primary Care Physician. That's The Only Reason Now That He's Getting To Live A Long And Healthy Life. That's What We're Not Rewarding. They Don't Have The Kind Of Resources And Commitment That We Are Giving To People Like Me. I Have Millions Of Dollars Of Equipment Available To Me When I Go To Work Every Day In An Operating Room.

My Biggest Fear, That 27 Percent Of Americans Under 65 Have An Existing Health Condition That, Without The Protections Of The Affordable Care Act, Would Mean They Would - Could Be Automatically Excluded From Insurance Coverage. Before The Aca, They Wouldn't Have Been Able To Get Insurance Coverage On The Individual Market, You Know, If You're A Freelancer Or If You Had A Small Business Or The Like.

I Think The Extreme Complexity Of Medicine Has Become More Than An Individual Clinician Can Handle. But Not More Than Teams Of Clinicians Can Handle.

I Learned About A Lot Of Things In Medical School, But Mortality Wasn't One Of Them.

We Look For Medicine To Be An Orderly Field Of Knowledge And Procedure. But It Is Not. It Is An Imperfect Science, An Enterprise Of Constantly Changing Knowledge, Uncertain Information, Fallible Individuals, And At The Same Time Lives On The Line. There Is Science In What We Do, Yes, But Also Habit, Intuition, And Sometimes Plain Old Guessing. The Gap Between What We Know And What We Aim For Persists. And This Gap Complicates Everything We Do.