“It is conceivable that we might be able to provide good medical care for everyone needing it, in a new system designed to assure equity, provided we can restrain ourselves, or our computers, from designing a system in which all 200 million of us are assumed to be in constant peril of failed health every day of our lives. In the same sense that our judicial system presumes us to be innocent until proven guilty, a medical care system may work best if it starts with the presumption that most people are healthy. Left to themselves, computers may try to do it in the opposite way, taking it as given that some sort of direct, continual, professional intervention is required all the time, in order to maintain the health of each citizen, and we will end up spending all our money on nothing but this.”

— Lewis Thomas

Source: Aspects of Biomedical Science Policy (1972), p. 4

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Lewis Thomas 31

American physician, poet and educator 1913–1993

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Lewis Thomas 31

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