How millennials are driving free market health care improvements

The high expectations of youth, nurtured by the era of the smartphone, could drive health care to become more responsive to patient demands.

“The focus on living to be well, combined with an emphasis on cost consciousness and a thirst for convenience, could drastically recast the health care systems in towns big and small,” Holly Fletcher wrote for The Tennessean.

“Millennials also define health differently than Gen Xers and boomers, according to a 2013 Aetna survey, which showed the younger generation was more apt to call eating right and exercise as being healthy,” Fletcher wrote. “Older Americans described healthy as ‘not falling sick.'”

“I think we have just gotten so used to the way health care works that we haven’t been pushing for the change like the millennials,”David Pickett, a managing parter at PwC, told Fletcher. “I think (other generations) want the same things — there’s some complacency.”

Just as millennials drive change and cultural trends, their expectation to have information and on-demand products could change how the health care system functions. Technological improvement will need to keep pace with generational shifts in expectations. The convenience of Amazon and Uber, for instance, have made millennials less forgiving when services are slow, expensive, and unsatisfactory.