Sustainable Financing of Healthcare Systems in Aging Societies

The American Council on Germany and the Global Coalition on Aging have launched a series of virtual events called “The Road to Silver Economy Forum,” which will take place in the run-up to the Forum on October 15 and 16 in Berlin. The series will focus on a range of issues building on the theme of this year’s Forum, which is titled “Leading the Future in an Aging World.”

Our rapidly aging societies force us to consider whether current healthcare funding models are sustainable and can continue providing innovations that have helped us realize our increased longevity. This webinar will explore how countries deal with the challenge of funding their healthcare systems as their population ages and healthcare grows exponentially. We will investigate the differences and similarities between healthcare systems in the United States and Europe and discuss how to finance and improve them to safeguard the medical discovery and innovation essential to healthy aging.

Join the American Council on Germany and the Global Coalition on Aging on May 28 at 11:00 am ET for the second webinar in our series, which will focus on “Sustainable Financing of Healthcare Systems in Aging Societies.” We are privileged to have Grace-Marie Turner, President of the Galen Institute, and Kristian Niemietz, Editorial Director and Head of Political Economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs, who will discuss what is needed to finance healthcare systems in an aging society sustainably. This event will be moderated by GCOA‘s Head of Advocacy Initiatives, Michiel Peters.

Michiel Peters (moderator) leads the advocacy initiatives at the Global Coalition on Aging and is a Senior Director at High Latner Group, a strategic consulting firm that helps position organizations, their leaders, and their ideas in the public arena.

He is an expert communications professional and strategist with over a decade of experience in the public and private sectors. He worked on local, state, and national campaigns before serving as a senior press officer in the Dutch Parliament. After eight years of working in the public sector, he transferred to the private sector to build up the corporate and public affairs functions for a large family-owned multinational in the agricultural industry.

At GCOA, he leads advocacy initiatives on various topics, from bone health to biopharmaceutical innovation. Additionally, he helps GCOA members with strategic positioning on issues related to our changing demography and its impact on our communities, from healthy aging to financial longevity and our changing workforce.

Dr. Kristian Niemietz is the IEA’s Editorial Director and Head of Political Economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs. He studied Economics at the Humboldt University Berlin and the University of Salamanca, graduating in 2007 as Diplom-Volkswirt (≈MSc in Economics). During his studies, he interned at the Central Bank of Bolivia (2004), the National Statistics Office of Paraguay (2005), and at the IEA (2006). In 2013, he completed a Ph.D. in Political Economy at King’s College London.

Dr. Niemietz previously worked as a Research Fellow at the Berlin-based Institute for Free Enterprise (IUF) and at King’s College London, where he taught Economics throughout his postgraduate studies. He is the author of the books A New Understanding of Poverty (2011), Redefining the Poverty Debate (2012), Universal Healthcare Without The NHS (2016), and Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies (2019).

Grace-Marie Turner founded the Galen Institute, a public policy research organization, in 1995 to promote an informed debate over free-market ideas for health reform. She has been instrumental in developing and promoting public policy ideas to transfer power over healthcare decisions to doctors and patients.

She writes extensively about incentives to promote a more competitive, patient-centered marketplace in the health sector,  testifies regularly before Congress, and advises senior government officials, governors, and state legislators on health policy.

She is the founder and facilitator of the Health Policy Consensus Group, which serves as a forum for analysts from market-oriented think tanks around the country to analyze and develop reform recommendations. She was also a leader in developing the Health Care Choices proposal. She is the editor of “Empowering Health Care Consumers through Tax Reform,” peer-reviewed and published by the University of Michigan Press, and has authored and contributed to numerous other books and white papers.