How prioritizing health is a prescription for US prosperity by Katherine Linzer, Jaana Remes, and Shubham Singhal published by McKinsey & Company (2020).
“The COVID-19 pandemic has been an unwelcome reminder that health and the economy are inextricably linked. For this year alone, the estimated impact of the pandemic on the US economy is a 4 to 11 percent reduction in real GDP.
Yet prior to COVID-19, health was not typically part of economic growth discussions; the policy debate often focused on controlling healthcare costs.
We estimate that poor health costs the United States about 16 percent of real GDP annually from premature deaths and lost productive potential among the working-age population.
But it does not have to be that way. Rethinking health as an investment, not just a cost, holds the potential not only to improve the health of millions of Americans but to accelerate economic growth for decades to come.
In this article, we build on our global report Prioritizing health: A prescription for prosperity to look more closely at the United States and identify what it would take to improve the health of the population and what the benefits would be for individuals, the economy, and society. (For details of the analysis, see the sidebar “Our methodology.”)…”
