Prevention Is Beautiful - But Don’t Forget Reactive Care
Preventive health is having its moment.
And it’s no surprise, public trust in U.S. healthcare has plummeted from 72% in 2020 to just 40% in 2024. Consumers are turning to wellness, wearables, and functional health clinics because they want transparency, agency, and tools that actually fit into their daily lives.
Companies like Function Health, Superpower, Lifeforce, and Humanaut are giving consumers data they can understand, helping them take control, and flipping our sick care model on its head.
I love it. I’m a long-time customer myself. It’s beautiful to see people invest in their health.
But Here’s the Thing: We Still Need Reactive Care
Somewhere along the way, reactive care became a dirty phrase, as if needing it meant failure. But life is unpredictable. Even the healthiest lifestyle can’t prevent everything.
Your child spikes a fever at 2 a.m.
You need a specialist for sudden chest pain.
A scan reveals something you didn’t expect.
A car accident changes everything in seconds.
These aren’t failures. That’s just life. And when they happen, prevention alone won’t help; you need reactive care. And by the way, the US has a pretty darn good system.
The Real Problem
Here’s the truth: prevention and reactive care still don’t connect.
You no longer need a doctor’s office to see your health data; it’s right there on your wrist, phone, and we’re now even seeing new innovation… in your toilet. But while collecting data is easy, understanding it isn’t. Most people don’t know what to do with it, and the traditional healthcare system isn’t built to use it either.
I see it all the time - friends, colleagues, and family members pouring time and money into blood panels, supplements, wearables, and wellness programs. They’re motivated and trying to do the right thing, yet it often feels like a patchwork of disconnected efforts. There’s no single source of truth, no cohesive path that connects it all back to their doctor or their insurance. It’s progress, but it’s fragmented progress, and that’s the problem.
That disconnect costs everyone. Americans now spend nearly $2 trillion a year on wellness products and services, while the U.S. healthcare system spends another $4.5 trillion treating illness - almost 20% of our GDP. Yet our outcomes still lag behind other developed nations.
Because 70% of healthcare costs are borne by government programs and employers, this gap doesn’t just strain patients - it drives up taxes, insurance premiums, and even suppresses wages.
The Future: The Best of Both Worlds
The future isn’t prevention versus reaction. It’s prevention plus reaction. It’s about building preventive health into the traditional system so everyone, not just the top 1%, have a complete solution.
Prevention is becoming part of our identity: how we eat, move, sleep, and think. But it can’t live outside the healthcare system forever. Replacing the healthcare system isn’t realistic given the barriers and entrenched interests. The smarter move is to embed prevention inside it.
Consumers are already doing their part. They’re investing time and money into tracking their sleep, nutrition, and fitness, and getting personalized diagnostics. Now it’s time for healthcare players - insurers, employers, and government programs - to meet them halfway by:
Subsidizing more of these proven preventive products and services.
Integrating this data to reduce waste and guide smarter care decisions.
There’s no excuse - we already have the technology toolkit to make this happen.
When prevention and reactive care work together, everyone wins: patients stay healthier, doctors get better insights, and payers spend less on avoidable disease.
Doctors don’t need to know your yoga schedule (well, at least not yet). What they do need is a system that can absorb consumer data, because that demand for health isn’t going anywhere.
At Pave Health Ventures, we back founders who see this convergence coming - those building bridges between consumer wellness and the healthcare system. If you’re creating solutions that bring prevention and reactive care closer together, we’d love to hear from you. Because the future of health won’t be built by one side or the other - it will be built by those who connect them.