As the Medical Director of the Kansas Business Group on Health I’m sometimes asked to weigh in on hot topics that might affect employers or employees. This is a reprint of a blog post from KBGH:

The last time you spoke to your financial planner, I suspect the first question she asked you was some version of “Where would you like to be in ten years?” Or twenty, or thirty. Maybe you told her that you wanted to have your house paid off, or to be out of debt, or to be retired, or to have enough savings to send your kids to college.

The last time you went to the doctor, though, I’m willing to bet your conversation was more…retrospective. Medical students are taught to use open-ended questions to initiate a visit, so he probably asked something like “What brings you in today?” And if you’re like most people your answer wasn’t “I want to make sure I’m happier and healthier ten years from now than I am today.” Instead you probably led with whatever complaint was bothering you that day: a rash, a sore joint, shortness of breath. This doesn’t mean you were doing it wrong. Doctors exist to relieve suffering, after all. The Hippocratic Oath states in part that “I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required.”

``Where would you like to be in ten years?`` isn't just a question that should come from your financial planner. It should come from your doctor, too.

But if you’ll allow the slight stretching of a metaphor, what if your interactions with your health care professional sounded more like your conversations with your financial professional? Because the person that is most in charge of your financial future may not be your financial advisor. It’s more likely your doctor. Here are some hard truths at the intersection of medicine and finance:

• Illness and injury are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States, contributing to almost two-thirds of cases.

• The risk of illness goes up as income falls, and more than two-thirds of Americans with incomes below $40,000 say they could not scrape together $400 in an emergency.

• Medical debt is the number one reason to get a call from a collection agency, and a sixth of Americans have an unpaid medical bill on a credit card.

• One-third of cancer patients have to ask friends or family for money to finance their treatments.

• Health insurance does not necessarily protect against catastrophic loss of savings if you get sick: the ACA, for all its good, did little to reduce medical bankruptcies.

• And the expense of medical treatment may actually make outcomes worse. Filing for bankruptcy is associated with a 79% increase in the risk of death in patients with cancer.

So “Where would you like to be in ten years?” isn’t just a question that should come from your financial planner. It should come from your doctor, too.

What if we applied a financial planning rubric to health and wellness? Once the shock wore off from your doctor asking you where you wanted to be in ten years, what would you say? If you were diabetic, you might first answer that you wanted to avoid the complications of diabetes: you wanted to keep your vision, you wanted to keep all your toes, and you wanted to avoid having to go on dialysis for kidney failure. These are all perfectly good answers, but they suffer from low expectations. They’re a little like telling your financial advisor that you want to avoid bankruptcy and avoid having the bank repossess your house.

What if you were more ambitious? What if you said that, in addition to all those, you wanted to run a 5k with your granddaughter, or dance at your son’s wedding without being out of breath? What if you said you wanted to be able to carry your infant grandson up and down stairs without fearing a fall? Fortunately, just as the best financial strategies tend to be simple, the best health strategies are simple, too. Just as the financial advisor would hopefully come up with a plan to start putting money away, your doctor would work with you to make a shared decision on how to get to the last dance at that wedding a few years from now. The financial advisor might tell you to maximize deposits into tax-deferred annuities, while the doc might work with you to start scheduling “deposits” of physical activity. Just as your financial advisor might tell you to knock off the daily trips to Starbucks, your doc might tell you to knock off the bright screens in your eyes for an hour or two before bed (and, hopefully, would tell you to take it easy on the #PSL).

The next time you have a meeting with employees about their health benefits, ask them what they think of this philosophy. After all, the Hippocratic Oath also says, “I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.” And more powerfully, “I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability.”  Also remember that as an employer, you have the opportunity to help your employees stay healthy by offering real food at work instead of processed foods, providing a wellness program in a box, or by helping to shape the environment in which your employees live.