If you look at the actual budget breakdown, it tends to be that 1 percent is allocated to preventative health. I think that’s a bit of an underestimate because, you know, for things like cancer screening, et cetera, that would also count as preventative. But it’s still a small minority and a lot less than it needs to be.
This is the great pivot that needs to happen, and it’s going to be hard. Because we have health systems that are based not really around health, they’re based around disease, they’re based around hospitals, and the notion of intervening when people are young with a disease and aiming to keep them alive. And that’s not a model that works very well with age-related diseases. We have to prevent people getting age-related diseases.
There’s a number of issues of age-related diseases. One is that they’re chronic, not acute. So they’re long-lasting, so you can’t cure them. But also, once you have one, you tend to then get another one. So you get these multi-morbidities, which leads to all sorts of challenges.
And moving away from a really successful health system, that’s done a great job of getting us to live these long lives, to something different which gets us to age differently and keep us healthy is going to be hard.
Source: McKinsey Quarterly
Subjects: Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy
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