Panel
Getting Our Health Priorities in Order: Prevention, Research, and Treatment
Milken InstituteEd Greissing, Katie Couric, Mark Alles, Tom Beauregard, Linda Fried, Eric Lefkofsky, Jim Robinson
- Society is expected to increasingly prioritize preventive investment over acute care, with success historically linked to collective public good and future reliance on similar investments starting with the National Institutes of Health.
- UnitedHealth Group has focused on prediabetes and diabetes prevention for approximately 10 years, with plans to expand enrollment, retention, and nationwide scaling of these programs.
- Obesity is identified as a national crisis costing $300 billion annually, while life expectancy in the United States has increased by only one year over the past 10 to 15 years.
- Precision prevention is predicted to emerge within the next 25 years as a complement to precision medicine, driven by sequencing costs that have dropped a million-fold in the last 12 years.
- The industry anticipates FDA approvals will become faster, enabling the treatment of cancers as chronic conditions until cures are achieved, including potential outcomes similar to the five-year remission seen in Jimmy Carter.
- Therapies targeting specific mutations, such as ALK-positive lung cancer, are expected to become more effective and cost lower, with early detection presented as a critical factor in preventing metastatic death.
- Hereditary screening for chemotherapy prevention requires 10 to 15-year studies to determine appropriate participant criteria, while neoantigen vaccines face challenges in patient selection without infrastructure fixes.
- A uniform data platform is deemed necessary to achieve regulatory "nirvana," as current lack of shared information and siloed data threatens to create a two-tier system where top centers offer superior care.
- If data infrastructure is not repaired, disparities in care quality are expected to widen initially within oncology before permeating other medical areas.
- Generic prescriptions, currently comprising 90% of the US market, are expected to see price reductions of up to 90% through increased competition.
- The current healthcare cost structure is highlighted as imbalanced, with 90 cents of every dollar spent on cancer treatment allocated to delivery services rather than the 10 cents representing the medicine itself.
- Challenges remain in shifting product offerings to address declining childhood obesity rates, with current efforts not yet sufficient to reverse trends in select cities.
- Concerns regarding financial barriers include the discrepancy between patient co-pays for life-saving surgery versus cancer treatments, and the observation that populations lacking access to health opportunities at every life stage are experiencing worsened outcomes.
- Physical activity is viewed as a fundamental prevention strategy capable of supporting longevity up to age 120, though the speaker expresses skepticism regarding the ability of governmental entities or committees to lead technological innovation adoption.