Living longer and healthier lives can cost less
Within our current system, one would expect that living longer and healthier would cost even more. After all, as we age, there is traditionally more spending on health care services.14 And health care spending has been growing annually for decades with a growth rate of 4.2% most recently in 2021.15
However, the opposite would occur in the Future of Health. Deloitte’s previous analysis in the Breaking the cost curve report projected a reduction in cost of nearly US$4 trillion if we adopt the Future of Health and focus on prevention, wellness, and empowered consumers. The projected increase in healthy years, therefore, will also potentially see a significant reduction (nearly a third) in health care spending.
This would involve increased screening, prevention, and monitoring. These are significantly lower-cost services than the traditional sick care that occurs in our current system, and also results in fewer sick care services due to prevention and early detection.16
Bringing more healthy years to everyone in the United States
To effect widespread, lasting change, all ecosystem stakeholders—employers, the life sciences and health care industries, consumer and technology industries, public health, and individuals—should come together. It could be possible for everyone in the United States to live longer, healthier lives, but only if organizations and individuals embrace the role they each could be playing to improve health. Achieving healthier years involves providing programs and support to change individual behaviors, making structural investments in the drivers of health (like housing, transportation, and education), and focusing on wellness and prevention.
The Future of Health we envision will be focused on wellness and prevention, but requires employers to assume a new role to drive value in the transformed health ecosystem. To extend the years that our current population can live in good health, however, that future needs to start today—and it turns out that the tools we need to help achieve it already exist.
To achieve systemic change, we should acknowledge that health happens everywhere, whether it’s within or outside the control of the usual health care industry players. On a day-to-day basis, people not only interact with their health care providers and systems, when needs arise, but also with their communities, employers, consumer technologies, and other systemic structures. Of all the major stakeholders that can play an outsized role in adding healthy life years, employers may be the most likely to be major catalysts for change. But they can’t do it alone, so it’s imperative that all stakeholders get involved and act now to improve health and wellness. Here are a few actions to get started:
Redefining employers’ role in health care. Increasingly, all private and public organizations are “health companies,” as much of the US workforce receives health benefits from their employers17 and conversely, the health and productivity of the workforce generally impacts the organizations’ success. Like post-WWII times when employers began offering health insurance benefits and shaped the current US health care system,18 employers can now serve as a catalyst for helping people live healthier lives.
The pandemic put a spotlight on workforce health, such that offering well-being support became a central competitive incentive for companies.19 After the height of the pandemic, today’s workers demand and expect greater health benefits and well-being transparency from their employers.20 It also became clear that these programs often meet the needs of certain groups only and therefore need to be more inclusive and designed equitably.
Investing in the health of employees and the public with an equitable lens can create a more productive workforce with greater contributions to creating value for stakeholders and driving purpose. Helping employees be healthier and more productive can also help boost retention rates.21 Thus the employers that make contributing to employee health a priority will likely have a competitive advantage.
