In 2023, healthcare spending totaled around 17.6% of the American GDP. If that sounds like a lot, it is, both as a standalone number and in comparison, as most OECD countries average around 12% of GDP on healthcare spending.
And while healthcare spending had somewhat leveled-off over the past few years, it is starting to grow again for a combination of reasons, some unique to America, and some not—an aging population requiring more care, new care options including advanced services and pharmaceuticals, a fragmented delivery system that results in high administrative costs, and inflationary supply chain pressures due to a multitude of reasons.
For those companies that have been in healthcare marketing for a while, it’s not news that healthcare marketing is just different than many other kinds or marketing. It requires detailed knowledge of complex regulatory requirements, careful consideration of ethical dilemmas that often fall into gray zones outside of legal, and the ability to communicate complex information in a way patient populations can understand. None of this is easy.
And it’s not getting any easier with the increasingly hyper-polarized way healthcare is being debated in this country.
Vaccine effectiveness, cuts to Medicaid, the pullback of federal subsidies on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) state exchanges, new trials subjecting more Medicare-covered services to pre-authorization, the consolidation of medical service providers, patient deductibles and co-pays creeping ever higher, employers shouldering higher and higher costs for their employees’ care, and the growth of “trackables” technology leading to more concerns around healthcare data leakage – it increasingly feels like the American healthcare system is reaching some kind of tipping point.
And while many of these issues will continue to play out in the White House, Congress and statehouses in the coming years, the more immediate concern for healthcare marketers is what to do in the meantime.
Given the whiplash changes coming from the White House and the federal regulatory agencies lately, it can increasingly feel hard to predict what’s going to happen a week from now, let alone a year from now.
It’s with that backdrop of swirling uncertainty for healthcare marketers that the 4As and the Coalition For Healthcare Communication (a 4As subsidiary) decided to launch an inaugural healthcare marketing summit this October during Advertising Week to at least begin the conversation in the industry around a lot of these issues. There might not be any easy answers, but it’s definitely time to start a broader industry conversation.
Covering big-picture topics such as the federal government’s role in healthcare spending, the growing wellness market (and why it’s distinct from the healthcare market) and growing laws and regulations around the use and collection of healthcare data, the summit aims to give healthcare marketers some new insights into thorny topics.
There are no easy conversations here as healthcare is a deeply personal issue for most, something that healthcare marketers are already well aware of. And the intense levels of polarization taking place in America right now aren’t helping – but the more healthcare marketers can stay abreast of the challenges, the better the outcomes.
