Healthy aging in a health equity context

Promoting healthy aging involves adding life to years, not just years to life. Including a health equity lens requires that we not only prioritize effective interventions, but also look at the distributional consequences of the interventions that promote healthy aging. This presentation will present a model and data that shows how individual-level interventions are less likely to improve equity in healthy aging than a social determinants or “health in all policies” approach. It will show how health behavior and medical care interventions are more likely to be adopted first by more advantaged seniors, while policy and environmental level interventions have a larger impact on less advantaged seniors and therefore have a greater equity impact.