Ultimately, for any reform to work, patients will have to change their behavior. Of course, everyone should continue to demand the best possible care. But we will have to accept that “best” doesn’t always mean the newest drug or the latest treatment. The looming question is whether patients are ready to embrace the realities of reform.

“You can make policy changes till you’re blue in the face, but if patients and doctors don’t change the way they think about medicine, we’ll never change medicine,” said Dr. David Newman, an emergency medicine physician at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York and the author of “Hippocrates’ Shadow: Secrets From the House of Medicine” (Simon & Schuster, 2008). “If everybody at the ground level believes that prescriptions and procedures are the things we need to make us healthy and well, then it doesn’t matter what kind of policy you draft or what kind of system you build. It’s never going to get better.”

Americans spend $2.5 trillion a year on health care, or about $8,160 per person, more than twice as much as many countries in Europe. But we clearly aren’t getting our money’s worth. Today, 46 million Americans aren’t covered, and measures like life expectancy and maternal and childhood health lag far behind those of many developed nations and even less-developed ones.

via Well – A Hurdle for Health Reform – Patients and Their Doctors – NYTimes.com.