Post Modern Healthcare’s Leadership Symposium: From Frustrations with Adult Health to Childhood Solutions

During the main panel discussion at highly influential Modern Healthcare magazine’s Leadership Symposium recently, prominent industry CEOs shared their frustrations on the need for change in health care but the lack of progress.  Of all the comments made in a poll of attendees, Modern Healthcare highlighted one by Erin Hammond, a senior value-based programs professional at Humana [emphasis added by me]: 

“Medicare Advantage and Medicare should start for high-risk communities the first day of preschool.  That way the government and healthcare orgs have an entire lifetime to shape healthy habits that will impact the high cost of the elderly population.  Between that and a sugar tax and increasing the quality of food we make available to our population...we would not only see the quality and healthy days of our citizens enhance as they get older, but much lower medical costs.”

 

Even if you don’t believe in a single cradle-to-grave health plan for all or taxes on unhealthy ingredients, Erin has a point:  If we don’t start to develop healthier habits in childhood, and then reinforce that healthier behavior later in life, our ever-worsening health trends won’t change.  And as we often point out: those with healthy habits end up paying much of the bill for those with unhealthy ones.

 

Yet the health care sector cannot change our health trajectory by itself.  Schools are an integral part of the solution, as well as the business and government sectors at both national, state & local levels.  As the above comment in Modern Healthcare implies, a broader cross-sector approach can deliver the outcomes needed to pay back sustained long-term K-12 prevention funding.