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Healthy Men 2030: Setting Men’s Health Goals as a Tool to Improve the Nation’s Health and Achieve Health Equity

Every 10 years, the U.S. Surgeon General has released Healthy People, a set of health promotion and disease prevention targets to evaluate the nation’s health and to guide the allocation of public health resources for the coming decade (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2020a). Healthy People’s goals and objectives shape local, state, and national policies, programming, and funding. In each of the five iterations of Healthy People, there are few men’s healthspecific goals and objectives, despite the persistent finding that men live shorter lives than women (Griffith, 2020; Griffith, Bruce, & Thorpe, 2019; National Center for Health Statistics, 2017). These differences between men and women and among men have economic (Thorpe et al., 2013), health (Bilal & Diez-Roux, 2018), and programmatic implications (i.e., limits awareness of preventive screenings and regular health care for men of all ages; Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2020b). In this commentary, we argue that explicitly including goals and objectives for men that mirror their leading causes of death will be particularly important to improving the nation’s health and to achieving health equity. From Healthy People 2000 to 2030, the majority of objectives and subobjectives specific to men have focused more on men’s sexual health behaviors than their leading causes of death. Looking back at previous iterations of Healthy People, language specific to men in Healthy People 2010 was included in only one of 28 leading health indicators, and 26 subobjectives out of approximately 900, whereas the leading health indicators and subobjectives for women were, 2 and 58, respectively (National Center for Health Statistics, 2012). The Healthy People 2010 subobjectives focused heavily on sexual health and family planning with the exception of one subobjective each for low-risk drinking, prostate cancer, and hip fractures for males aged 65 years and older (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015). Healthy People 2020 did not specify men as a topic area, but did have data by gender and included 28 objectives specifically targeting males (Porche, 2010). Of the 355 total objectives in Healthy People 2030, there are 30 objectives that explicitly mention women, females, or maternal health, but only four objectives that specifically mention males or men: one regarding prostate cancer, one regarding family planning, and two regarding sexually transmitted infections (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2020c). Thus, with the exception of prostate cancer, none of the four objectives presented in Healthy People 2030 (Figure 1) align with the five leading causes of death for men: heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries (e.g., motor vehicle accidents, drowning, falls, and poisoning [e.g., drug overdoses]), chronic lower respiratory diseases (mainly chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and stroke (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019). Given the gendered patterns of disease morbidity and mortality and the economic and social costs associated with them, one might wonder why these gendered patterns of mortality do not play a bigger role in guiding Healthy People in particular and U.S. health policy in general. Though we have no definitive answers, we offer two potential explanations. One explanation may be that discourse explaining men’s health problems and patterns tend to suggest that the primary sources of men’s poor health are located in men’s biology, men’s internalized notions of masculinity, or social norms and pressures among men rather than the social determinants of men’s health (Elder & Griffith, 1025465 HEBXXX10.1177/10901981211025465Health Education & BehaviorSemlow et al. article-commentary2021