I support tax revenue increases, including the top 2 percent, but only if accompanied by responsible spending limits. The key is balance.
In a successful health system, the proportion of per-capita health dollars used for home care, outpatient primary care, and preventive services should actually increase, not decrease, relative to those for acute hospital care.
Affordability is critical so that patients have access to medicines. At the same time, it's also important that we have the kind of incentives that allow us to do the kinds of studies that we need to do to go after these diseases like Alzheimer's.
We need to work together to fairly assess and improve the long-term economic and health value - and affordability - of all components of the healthcare system, including hospitalizations, drugs, devices, and other interventions, to optimize our health investment decisions.
Your job as a trial attorney is to try to convey to the jury the essence of the people you represent.
I'm a big believer in institutions.
I do worry that as we try to fix this long-term debt and deficit situation that we don't destroy the market incentives for biomedical research. What I fear is the government using its considerable clout to say, 'Here's the price we're setting for your medicines.'
The business of biomedical research is mostly about failure. Few projects we commission will ultimately result in success. But every study we do contributes to the body of knowledge that brings science and society closer to a solution.
I had a fantastic upbringing by two parents who cared deeply about their children but, more importantly, believed that anything was possible for their children and, in some ways, almost brainwashed us to be successful.
While a fundamental responsibility of business leaders is to create value for shareholders, I think businesses also exist to deliver value to society.
My father was born in the year 1900 in South Carolina, and he grew up at a time where being an African-American child in the American South was to be deprived of access to anything close to a reasonable education. He only had three years of formal education, but he was self-taught. He read two newspapers a day.
My grandfather on my paternal side, Richard Frazier, was born in the late 1850s and, therefore, was born into slavery but was a sharecropper in South Carolina for his entire life.
Institutions are what allow us to have continuity in civilizations.
If I had not been coached well about how to deal with a culture and a set of values that were foreign to my own, I would not have been able to be successful.
I think that size is not the key to innovation. Scale doesn't confirm an innovation advantage.
America's leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry, and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal.
I don't believe it's appropriate for me or any other CEO to wade into every political dispute. That's not what we're here for.
My legacy is that Merck continues to do what Merck has always done, which is to make singular impact on human health and animal health around the world. It's that simple.
You either innovate or you become defunct.
Biopharmaceutical research and development efforts have achieved dramatic improvements in global health and longevity, and we are committed to continuing our quest.
