Healthcare costs are among the top concerns facing our country today, and with good reason. The National Healthcare Expenditures (NHE) have risen to roughly $5 trillion annually. It is over 17% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is considerably higher than most, if not all other countries. Meanwhile, preventable chronic disease runs rampant.
While there are many factors involved that make solving the problem complex, Innovia Life has set an ambitious goal to help lower the NHE by $200 billion annually, or roughly 4% of the total. We plan to do this by partnering with payers, employers, and provider networks to help make our subclinical support services more widely available and utilized throughout the country as an effective population health management tool.
Healthcare Spending
Health care spending in the US reached $4.9 trillion and increased 7.5 percent in 2023, growing from a rate of 4.6 percent in 2022. More than $1.9 trillion came from Medicaid and Medicare, accounting for 39% of the total spend. Private health insurance spent over $1.4 trillion, growing at an even faster rate and making up 30% of the total spend, while out of pocket costs totaled over $500 billion, or about 10% of the total spend.
As shown in the NHE highlights:
– Spending for hospital care services increased 10.4 percent in 2023 to reach $1.5 trillion, accounting for 31% of the total spend. This rate of growth was the fastest since 1990.
– Spending for physician and clinical services accounted for 20 percent of the total, and increased 7.4 percent to $978.0 billion in 2023, which was faster than the growth rate of 4.6 percent in 2022.
– Retail prescription drug spending accounted for 9 percent of the total at more than $449 billion, which was also an increase of 11.4 percent in 2023, accelerating from a rate of 7.8 percent in 2022.
How Can Innovia Life Help?
One of the most simple and common sense approaches is to layer in Innovia Life’s subclinical support services to help foster connection and growth. As a complement to clinical services through prevention, aftercare, in-between care, and even a replacement for low acuity situations, we help everyday people lead happier, healthier lives.
We offer a wide variety of educational, experiential, and therapeutic support groups led by our team of live facilitators that fall into three main categories – health & wellness, mental health & recovery, and work & personal relationships. We also can create customized groups to address the needs of the populations we are serving through our partnering organizations.
Lowering stress, decreasing loneliness, creating better habits, and building resilience improves overall health reduces the number of more expensive clinical episodes. This saves a considerable amount of money, while also having the additional positive gain of improving productivity and reducing the burden on the system.
While our goal of $200 billion may seem lofty to some, we feel it would be just the beginning, as widespread adoption and utilization can create a much larger positive effect on the overall health and wellness of people, cut overall spending even more, and give more money and time back to the people.
refs: https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-reports/national-health-expenditure-data/nhe-fact-sheet
https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf
