Healthy workforce/healthy economy: the role of health, productivity, and disability management in addressing the nation's health care crisis: why an emphasis on the health of the workforce is vital to the health of the economy.
The time has come to accept the fundamental reality that the impending budgetary squeeze, the current health crisis and the workplace are inextricably linked and fiscal soundness can be advanced through strategic investment in the health and productivity of the working-age population through a new preventive-based paradigm centered in the workplace.
Abstract
The United States’ health care system is on a collision course with demographic trends and economic realities. In its May 2008 issue, the health policy journal Health Affairs predicted that “if current trends persist, sometime between 2016 and 2020 existing federal revenues will cover only health entitlements, Social Security, debt service, and a smaller defense budget, leaving nothing for anything else, including the environment, education or new health initiatives.” (These trends are independent of the 2008 crisis in the financial markets.) The aging and retirement of the baby boomers—the so-called “silver tsunami”—is accompanied by an increased burden of chronic disease across all age groups that threaten the U.S. pipeline of healthy, productive workers. The balance between economic net contributors (“workers”) and those dependent on government programs, ie, Social Security retirement and disability programs, Medicare, and Medicaid, is undergoing a radical shift. How can the U.S. meet its obligations to programs such as Medicare and Medicaid as well as Social Security if the engine that supplies financing, the workforce, is aging and weakened by chronic disease? Simply providing insurance for everyone in the U.S. will not solve this problem. Nor will spending more money on the traditional model of “sick-care” and eventual late-stage medical interventions. The time has come to accept the fundamental reality that the impending budgetary squeeze, the current health crisis and the workplace are inextricably linked. The workforce is the engine that drives the economy and supports the financial underpinnings of the health care system. The working-age population is, therefore, the key to assuring the future availability of health care in the U.S. Fiscal soundness can be advanced through strategic investment in the health and productivity of the working-age population through a new preventive-based paradigm centered in the workplace.