I already wrote a little about the life optimization angle, but I want to delve a little deeper in to the question of how to get people think about their health before they’re actually sick. This seems like a pretty classic behavioral economics problem, where people devalue the future even though it’s against their own best interest.
One of my favorite quotes on the subject comes from someone named David Laibson in a Harvard Magazine article titled The Marketplace of Perceptions. He explains, “People very robustly want instant gratification right now, and want to be patient in the future. If you ask people, ‘Which do you want right now, fruit or chocolate?’ they say, ‘Chocolate!’ But if you ask, ‘Which one a week from now?’ they will say, ‘Fruit.’ Now we want chocolate, cigarettes, and a trashy movie. In the future, we want to eat fruit, to quit smoking, and to watch Bergman films.”
Changing this is not an easy task (financial institutions have exactly the same issue where people would rather spend today and save tomorrow). You’ve got to overcome a whole lots of inertia (tried to start a diet lately?). With that said, it’s clearly one of the biggest issues facing our healthcare system.
I went to the PSFK conference last week and one of the panels that was really fantastic was called “Building Healthy Brands with Heart.” On the panel was Jay Parkinson from Hello Health (the Wired article from a few years ago gives a pretty good insight into what he’s all about).
Anyway, the thing Jay said that blew me away was, “I make $10,000 for treating asthma and $300 for preventing it.” That’s pretty nutty. What’s more, when you consider the economic incentive structure together with the psychological barriers people have to being healthier we have a truly out of whack system. The big question that needs to be solved is clearly how you move these incentives around, helping people be more preventative with their own health and make it more in doctor’s interest to help people before they’re sick. Clearly this isn’t something GE can or should tackle alone, but it seems like something we all need to be thinking about.
Photo credits: Money photo by jenn_jenn used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.