Can Spending More Improve Your Health and Prolong Your Life?

The desire to live longer and healthier lives has spawned a growth in services and supplements. So what works best? Humans have -- presumably -- always aspired to living longer, healthier lives. Now that might be more possible than ever before -- especially if you have enough money. Think about the Fountain of Youth. Versions of the promise of a life-giving spring date to Ancient Greek philosophers, with variations through the centuries. But the basic concept was: Find the spring, drink its waters, and you're young and spry again. Today, people seem more inclined than ever to believe there is a path to better health, increased longevity and an improved healthspan -- a term from the 1980s meaning that the quality and quantity of life can more closely align. To meet this desire is a growing longevity and wellness industry. Typically on the science side, in addition to doctors in traditional practices are the growing number of concierge medical practices across the country that offer a wide range of services to those who can afford them. Begun in the 1990s and expanding ever since, they eschew insurance in favor of annual retainers that can range from $4,000 to $45,000 or more. The internal medicine or family medicine doctors who have started these practices are not necessarily better trained than the doctors who have stayed in the traditional insurance-model practices. But they have chosen to see fewer patients, spend more time with them, and offer in-house services -- like scans, for example -- that otherwise would have to be outsourced. According to the Private Physicians Alliance, a membership group of concierge doctors, somewhere from 7,000 to 22,000 concierge medical practices operate in the United States today. That's compared with nearly 400,000 insurance-based medical practices, according to the Bureau of Health Workforce.