November 6, 2025

By Jamie Towey

“We don’t like old people in America.”

I didn’t expect a keynoter at the Milken Institute’s Future of Health Summit I am attending in Washington, D.C. to be so blunt. In my experience, major industry gatherings like this devolve into platitudes and truisms. But the bluntness I heard at the Summit was refreshing and left me feeling cautiously optimistic about fixing America’s apparent public health crisis.

The Milken Institute is a think tank that focuses on promoting human flourishing in the United States and around the world. It was founded by Michael Milken, a billionaire who dedicated part of his vast fortune to improve health, financial, and public policy outcomes. Milken, who moderated two of the Wednesday panels, was once considered Wall Street’s “Junk Bond King” before his conviction for securities fraud (he was later pardoned). For the last 30 years, he has exclusively focused on his philanthropic efforts. If you’re ever visiting our nation’s capital, swing by their newly minted ($500 million!) interactive museum, the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream.

The Future of Health Summit attracts professionals from all walks of life – doctors, entrepreneurs, nurses, philanthropists, researchers, and TV producers. The people I met there are ambitious, passionate about their work, highly intelligent, and apparently empathetic toward the people they’re trying to help. Allow me to share three takeaways from the Summit.

First, I can’t fully convey the shift in the zeitgeist from drugs, drugs, drugs to preventative health. This is no longer a conversation topic for your raw-milk-drinking, yoga-obsessed neighbor; the world’s largest healthcare companies are trying to wrap their heads around shifting toward a preventative model of care instead of a reactive one. An Alzheimer’s panel put this shift in stark relief. Dr. Howard Fillit, the co-founder of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, shared how when he started medical school in 1970, the word “Alzheimer’s” did not appear once in his course materials. Just 50 years later, we are now experiencing breakthroughs in research on beta-amyloid biomarkers that will soon have us treating Alzheimer’s like heart disease. When does your doctor give you statins – right after a defibrillator rescue? Of course not. Similarly, cheap blood tests may soon connect patients with therapies or even mere lifestyle adaptations that lower their risk for brain disease.

Nowhere was this vibe shift more apparent than during an interview with Chris Klomp, Director of Medicare at CMS, a man whose passion for preventative medicine was palpable. A former entrepreneur who said he joined CMS purely as a visceral demonstration of begrudging duty to his four children, Mr. Klomp directs essentially the largest corporation on earth: CMS will dole out over $1.5 TRILLION this year, and according to Mr. Klomp, 25% of that goes to the last year of care. Basic steps like getting age-appropriate screenings for diseases like breast cancer, colon cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s, or establishing healthy eating, sleeping, and exercise patterns, help patients and providers, and save money.

Second, I was relieved to see attention paid to caregivers. 63 million Americans are currently caring for a family member. Six million of those caregivers are minors. A particularly impressive young woman named Jaelyn Smith talked about caring for her father; Jaelyn is just 17 years old, and yet her story is hardly unique. Healthcare leaders are slowly realizing that patients and their caregivers are almost one and the same. “Helping the helpers,” giving caregivers the information, opportunities, and resources they need, saves caregivers and providers enormous sums of money. One panelist said that we shouldn’t be talking to caregivers from a position of pity; we should be lionizing their amazing work!

Finally, trust. The government’s and private sector’s botched response to Covid utterly decimated public trust in healthcare. Don’t take my word for it – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, was asked by Mr. Milken himself what he’d like his legacy to be as Director of NIH, Without missing a beat, Director Bhattacharya said, “to restore trust.”

There were things that worried me at this conference: AI shamans proffering solutions to every personal and industrial ailment; gene editing startups who see humans as nothing more than genomes to be sequenced, biomarkers to be flagged; and other troubling ethical challenges.

But I left this conference renewed in spirit and proud of the work we do here at Aging with Dignity. Want to talk about preventative health? What better tool than Five Wishes to help you plan for how you want to be treated at the end of life? And speaking of Five Wishes, I can’t think of a better way to join patients and caregivers at the hip. One doctor I met, now a health CEO, reminisced on how he used to carry a backpack full of Five Wishes to his house calls decades ago because of how effective it was. Loved that! Patients can only trust physicians and the American healthcare system if they share a common commitment to upholding human dignity.

We’ll continue to lead the way. After all, we love old people!

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)