quotable quotes - April 2010
an offer insurers can’t refuse
"I send the payors a letter saying that I believe [continuous glucose monitoring] is in the best interest of my patients’ long-term survival and that I have notified them and their attorney that I am holding the insurer responsible for the long-term medical complications that result from inadequate glucose control. I get very few denials with that."
- Frank Schwartz, MD, FACE (University of Ohio, Athens) discusses how he addresses insurers who will not cover the costs of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) at the 6th annual meeting of the Clinical Diabetes Technology society in San Antonio.
challenging the paradigm
"[Studies] suggest patients treated with stepwise metformin and sulfonylurea fail therapy, and their A1cs begin to climb – this is the ADA’s treatment recommendation! That’s an example of non-evidence based medicine."
- Ralph DeFronzo, MD (University of Texas, San Antonio) criticizes the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and European Association for the Study of Diabetes’ (EASD) recommended treatment protocol at the 19th annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) in Boston.
call to action
"American healthcare is a fragmented system of medical specialties… [but] all medicine is local. In the next few years, we only need to show that one community can do this. That community can be any of ours – we can build it from there. We just need a model."
- Endocrine surgeon and The New Yorker staff writer Atul Gawande, MD, MPH (Harvard Medical School, Boston) challenges physicians at the 19th annual AACE meeting to take healthcare reform into their own hands.
