As the world prepares for the 2025 U.N. General Assembly's fourth high-level meeting on noncommunicable diseases, health care systems face a perfect storm: rising treatment costs, critical workforce shortages, and diminishing development assistance. While technology offers promising health care solutions, the development sector must move past both techno-skepticism and silver-bullet thinking to realize its potential.
According to the World Health Organization, up to 40% of resources spent in health are wasted through inefficiencies such as unnecessary interventions, administrative complexity, inflated pricing, and fraud.
In the United States alone, this wasteful spending could reach $935 billion — exceeding the annual federal defense budget. These challenges hit lower-middle-income countries particularly hard, where health development funding could decline by up to 24% over the next six years.