Future Health Dialogue @ UNGA – The Economics of Health for All: Investing in Health as Infrastructure

Global spending on health reached $9.8 trillion in 2022, nearly 10 percent of the world’s economy. Yet for all that investment, 4.5 billion people still lack access to essential health services, prevention remains a small share of health spending, and chronic disease continues to exact an enormous human and economic toll. Poor health is estimated to reduce global GDP by roughly 15 percent each year, while noncommunicable diseases alone are projected to cost the global economy $47 trillion by 2030. At the very moment when the world needs greater investment in health, many countries are facing tightening public budgets, declining development assistance, and growing pressure on health systems. The paradox is hard to ignore: the world spends vast sums treating illness but far less creating the conditions for health.

Health should be viewed not as a cost to be managed, but as an investment that drives productivity, resilience, innovation, and sustainable growth. Achieving Health for All will require more than increasing healthcare budgets. It calls for a different economic model: one that measures success by the health societies create, not only the care they deliver, and that mobilizes new forms of public and private capital to sustain long-term investment.

That shift is becoming increasingly possible. Artificial intelligence, genomics, digital health, and predictive analytics are transforming our ability to anticipate disease before it occurs. But technology alone will not change outcomes. It must be matched by new ways of financing health—rewarding long-term wellbeing instead of the volume of services delivered.

Around the world, governments, investors, philanthropies, and the private sector are beginning to rethink where capital flows. Innovative approaches such as blended finance, public-private partnerships, health impact funds, and outcome-based payments are helping move investment beyond traditional healthcare systems. Increasingly, this also means investing in health as critical infrastructure: the physical, digital, and community systems that enable people to remain healthy.

This session explores what it will take to finance that future. Bringing together leaders in policy, investment, technology, architecture, and healthcare, it will examine how a new economic approach to health can unlock sustainable growth, strengthen resilience, and accelerate the transition from healthcare systems that manage illness to health systems that anticipate, prevent, and create wellbeing.