Health, Biomedical Science and Society Initiative

Health span, not life span

Health span, not life span. Life span is how long we live. Health span is how long we live with the best possible health. Our goal is better health, not more treatment. That said, health care should focus more on early health and less on late disease. To achieve that goal, we will need a much greater focus on prevention, and this must be brought to bear everywhere: at work, at school and at home. Incentives must be changed to support and encourage people to stay healthy. We must move to a system that prevents illness and protects health for as long as possible and for as many as possible. This should be accomplished through better coordination of care so even individuals with chronic illnesses stay healthier longer and have fewer complications. This alone should decrease health care spending while providing a national health benefit in the form of increased productivity.

Individuals are living longer but they are not necessarily living well. The focus on increasing lifespan to the detriment of the quality of that life has resulted in great disparities in the amount of time, effort, and resources devoted to treating late disease rather than early health improvement. 

• Ten to twelve percent of all United States health care spending, and 27% of all Medicare spending, is devoted to treatment of people in their last year of life.¹
• Up to 30% of Medicare spending for people during their last two years of life is unnecessary and does nothing to improve their health.²
• In 2003, the cost of treating seven common chronic diseases – cancers, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, mental, disorders, and pulmonary conditions – equaled $277 billion.³ That same year, these diseases attributed to over $1 trillion of lost productivity due to missed days and lower worker productivity.⁴
• In 2007, the absenteeism rate was 2.3%, costing some large employers $760,000 a year in direct payroll, a number that doesn’t take into account the additional costs of lower employee productivity⁵

Over the past decade, researchers have increasingly focused on identifying factors that could lead to living healthier lives, including income, education, employment, insurance status, diet, exercise, and geographic location. The Public Agenda for the Alliance for Aging Research and the American Federation for Aging Research found that there has been an increased emphasis on keeping people productive longer, as opposed to simply prolonging their lives.⁶ Reforms to our healthcare system should promote this emerging view on health.

Emphasizing health span over life span will result in better long-term health outcomes in the United States. Indeed, the increasing life expectancy and decreasing rates of disability among today’s elderly can be directly attributed to the healthier childhoods of successive generations, a trend that can continue if health span is increasingly emphasized. We should combine prevention, innovation, and technology to improve the long-term health in the nation.