Instead, we are the least active population of any first-world nation, with the least walkable cities and a neurotic dependency on cars and maladaptive transport infrastructure. Ultra-processed foods dominate our supermarkets. US citizens get poor sleep at rates immensely higher than their European counterparts. Obesity rates are in a different stratum than the rest of the world. We are in the midst of a cataclysmic divergence between economic progress and health, and Americans are sleepwalking straight through it.

How is it that a country with such massive fiscal resources, harbouring the densest pocket of healthcare innovation in the world, can tolerate a public health crisis of this size?

The West has all the resources it needs to correct this bleak trajectory, but is missing one key driver; a focus on prevention. America's expenditure on preventative medicine declined from 3.6% of the healthcare budget in 2000 to just 2.9% in 2018. Primary care accounts for less than 5% of total health expenditure, versus an average of 14% in OECD countries. It costs 3x more to visit a family doctor than the other G7 countries. These numbers reflect a passive, reactive America—an America whose culture rejects proactivity in favour of indifference.

Our institutional complacency is already creating dire outcomes: hypertension and diabetes hospitalizations are 8x and 3x higher respectively than other G7 countries, along with 50% more deaths from ischemic heart disease. Inducing change will require uprooting both the healthcare services the public interacts with and the way the public thinks about healthcare as a concept.

In response to the healthcare chaos of the broader United States, a human longevity movement has quietly blossomed. Consumer-facing lab testing companies like Function Health and Superpower offer a complete blood biomarker profile, no physician required. Bryan Johnson and his company Blueprint are redefining what it means to fight against aging. Whoop and Oura are making every second of your day trackable and optimizable. Markets are adapting to the lack of preventative healthcare in America, providing accurate solutions without the bloat from an overburdened system. Slowly but surely, a counterculture is brewing.

Despite great strides from the aforementioned products, there are critical bottlenecks that prevent them from becoming mainstream. For the vast majority of Americans, diagnostic tools like lab tests or wearables are luxury products. Midwestern families don't have the disposable income to spend on the array of offerings available to them; a $200 blood panel, a $350 wearable, and the endless army of supplements and accessories to go with it. High price points have become an accepted reality in this industry—flash and excess are directly infused into the marketing and design of these companies.

For those that pay the high premium, the limitations of these products are just as large an obstacle. Most subscription-based lab tests are so infrequent that they miss the context of day-to-day or week-to-week fluctuations. Non-invasive wearables are a surface-level analysis atop an ocean of possible biomarker data. Without a robust array of diagnostics showing you what to optimize, it becomes more difficult to justify supplements that thrive on specificity. An explosion of preventative medicine is lingering, but the ecosystem to support it just isn't ready.

Diagnostics will be the bedrock of our transition from reactive to proactive medicine. A world with biomedical information on demand, available to every income stratum with clinical-grade accuracy, is one rich with vitality. With a brewing movement towards preventative healthcare and a thriving ecosystem of tools to amplify it, wellness will move to centre stage in our culture; health will be the new social capital.

Our goal with Matrix is to provide the ecosystem necessary to support this change. We want to power the latent counterculture diffusing through America. We want to give people the tools they need to break free from the slow slog of chronic illness. We want to back the new social capital in the West.

We want to give everyone the gift of a long, healthy life.