New York Times Q&A with Dr. Brody

From the NYT article:

Q. You write that doctors have an ethical responsibility to advocate health care reform. Why?

A. Doctors have two responsibilities. First, they have a moral duty as an individual advocate. A doctor has a responsibility to his or her individual patients to make them healthier and to help them live longer.

But doctors have a second moral duty: they have an obligation to the general public to be prudent stewards of scarce resources. Doctors only get about 10 percent of health care costs in their pockets, but they control about 80 percent. That isn’t our money — it’s someone else’s — and the public has entrusted us to spend it as wisely as possible.

Click here to access the NTY article. Click here to access the NEJM editorial by Dr. Brody on health care reform.