Healthspan, a macro-view

We all have seen in one form or another these depressing (if you are in the US) graphs showing how much of an outlier the US is in terms of return on healthcare expenditures (first graph on the deck). There are lots of reasons for that, one of which might become apparent in a minute.

➡️ I wanted to create a similar graph for healthy life expectancy, or healthspan: the number of years one might expect to live without illness or disability (a reasonably well-defined, if somewhat controversial, concept). The resulting graph is a more pronounced version of the previous one: Japan, Singapore, South Korea firmly at the top (Japan and South Korea on the Pareto frontier) and the US faring dismally (second graph on the deck).

🍭 The counterintuitive visualization (3rd graph on the deck), at least at first, is when you plot the difference between the first two metrics: life expectancy-healthspan. It describes the average number of years a person will stay alive but not in good health. I would have expected (with the usual exception of the US), that good health would be a natural outcome of spending on healthcare. But it is more complicated than that: first, for a number of countries that have significantly lower life expectancies and low healthcare expenditures, people don't live long in poor health. Nigeria seems to be an extreme outlier in that respect: you are either healthy or dying. But for countries that have a life expectancy of 60 or more, the number of years lived with illness or disability increases with health expenditures. One possible explanation is that all that money is used to keep us alive longer while suffering from chronic conditions or diseases of aging.

💡 The final graph on the deck simply shows that indeed, the longer we live, the longer we spend in poor health, but this trend exhibits a plateau when looking at years lived with disability/illness vs. healthy life expectancy. Now that's a reason to get behind healthspan!

@hevolution, @alex z, @eric verdin, @jordan shlain, @john battelle, @mehmood khan, @brian kennedy, @miguel Coelho, @robert lee Kilpatrick, @tim opler, @joanna bensz