Demand reduction offers the possibility of "bending the cost curve" on long-term healthcare, or reducing the slope of the line that represents the cost of healthcare over time. As populations age, multiple cost curves begin to rise. We understand this intuitively-the costs of administering healthcare to an average human being are much larger when he is old than when he is young. Thus, the cost curve increases dramatically. Expand this to include an entire population, and you have millions or billions of cost curves. If that population on average is aging, then the average curve is also sloping upwards.
This can create problems for governments, which operate on limited budgets. Upward-sloping curves require governments to make tough choices between more expensive robust solutions and cheaper stop-gap measures.
Of course, when it comes to the private sector, there are many companies that stand to make money off of stop-gap measures. You might ask yourself, then, why would the private sector want to partner in efforts to narrow the funnel?
Take the pharmaceutical industry for example. It might seem at first that the private sector would not be incentivized to reduce the incidence of NCDs in the population. After all, most drug companies are in "imperfect alignment," which is to say that while their products might have a beneficial effect on public health, their business model does rely on the presence of disease. Why would a company that sells heart medication be interested in reducing the number of patients suffering from cardiovascular disease?
It's a reasonable question. But it belies an overly simplistic view of the pharmaceutical industry, whose motives can be aligned (and misaligned) with public health goals in numerous, often contradictory ways.
Due to the realities of patent law and the wide availability of generic drugs, pharmaceutical companies tend to make the most profit off of robust solutions-not stop-gaps. In a more conventional market situation, these companies would be incentivized to pursue both new treatments for NCDs and mass production of less-effective treatments. But, because the magnitude of the NCD problem is so large, the simple reality is that if governments-stuck with rising costs along an upward-sloping curve-are forced to invest heavily in cheap treatments, they will not also be able to invest in robust solutions.
By bending the average curve downward using preventative measures, high-quality treatments become more affordable. Thus, paradoxically, it is often in the private sector's interest-even in cases of imperfect alignment-to ensure that governments have demand under control. By narrowing the funnel, the private sector can, in some cases, increase their share of a highly profitable market.