Benjamin Niestroj
Economic Rationale for Investing in Healthspan – A Perspective and the Role of Venture Capital
Healthcare’s cost curves are driven by late-stage disease, yet the real economic upside lies in extending the years people live well. Reframing “health” as an investable outcome—powered by prevention, measurable progress, and new financing models—opens a path from reactive spending to productive, value-creating longevity.
Extending healthy life expectancy by just one year could unlock $38 trillion in global value—and up to $367 trillion for ten years.
The current system rewards treating illness, not avoiding it—entrenching fee-for-service incentives and chronic-care revenues that resist change. A shift to healthspan optimization challenges this logic but promises macro-level gains in productivity, cost reduction, and resilience. Venture capital can bridge the transition: funding riskier science (from digital biomarkers to regenerative medicine), shaping “Prevention-as-a-Service” models, and insisting on rigorous metrics that tie returns to real-world outcomes. With outcome-based reimbursement and policy co-investment, prevention moves from aspiration to a calculable, insurable growth thesis.
When Prevention Becomes an Asset Class:
Why Healthspan Attracts Capital
What you’ll learn
-
How healthspan economics reframes value creation beyond lifespan and why the productivity dividend is so large
-
Why today’s reimbursement and business models bias systems toward treatment over prevention—and how that blocks investment
-
How venture capital de-risks early healthspan innovation and shapes scalable “Prevention-as-a-Service” platforms
-
Which metrics matter to prove value—biological age, delayed onset, quality of life, utilization—and how they enable outcome-based finance
-
Where policy can accelerate adoption—through supportive regulation, co-investment vehicles, and tax incentives that crowd in private capital
Benjamin Niestroj is a Founding Partner at 5P Future of Health, a boutique venture capital firm focused on HealthTech and Digital Health. He also serves as a Professor of Digital Economics at FOM University and a Senior Researcher at the Zukunftsinstitut, where he analyzes market and technology trends and their impact on business models and industries. Previously, he worked as a strategy consultant at BCG and founded a digital B2B online learning platform.
About the Author
Benjamin Niestroj
Connect
