Each year, leading advocates, policymakers, and champions in the aging community gather in Washington, DC, to celebrate our collective efforts to enhance healthy aging. As we approach our annual Heroes in Health Celebration on Tuesday, September 30, 2025, we’re highlighting the remarkable work of our award honorees in this blog series.
For 23 years, our 2025 Daniel Perry Founder’s Award Recipient Dr. Georges Benjamin has led the American Public Health Association (APHA) as Executive Director. His steadfast defense of public health in challenging political times has earned him recognition as one of Washingtonian Magazine’s 500 most influential people in health policy three years in a row.
We caught up with Dr. Benjamin this summer to see how he’s doing and hear his thoughts on the future of health policy:
As executive director of APHA, what does a “healthy nation” look like to you?
It’s a nation that prioritizes health in such a way that every aspect of our society works to achieve optimal well-being for everyone. It uses a health in all policies concept of policy development and ensures costs are not an unacceptable barrier to achieving optimal health for all. Individual responsibility is important but societal responsibility is just as important. We can certainly bench make ourselves in the short term but striving to be amongst the healthiest nations instead of at the bottom when compared to other high-income countries.
From practicing physician to public health policy advocate, you’ve spent nearly 50 years fighting for accessible health care for all. How have your experiences in medical practice shaped your fight for health care reform?
I have seen the amazing things our investment in research and innovation has permitted us to do. When I was a medical student people used to die routinely from diseases that we can now cure. We can also completely repair a host of injuries that people would have died or have been severely disabled from 20 years ago. I have also seen the lost opportunity of preventing many of these injuries and diseases from occurring in the first place because of the lack of adequate investment in prevention, the lack of utilization in preventive interventions and the poor understanding that people have of the benefits of simple preventive steps. In many ways it is the misalignment of our priorities that has disappointed me the most. There is an injustice to this inequality of opportunity that I have always hoped to one day help fix.
What can the public do to help ensure equitable health policy and access to care for everyone?
We must change the perspective about health so that everyone believes the U.S. should have a system with everyone in and no one out, where everyone has equal access to care of high quality, and that we all agree that we cannot succeed as a society if we don’t care appropriately for one another.
Each year, we present the Daniel Perry Founder’s Award to an individual or group working to change the way we view aging and well-being. How can shifting our perspective on aging improve health outcomes for older adults?
I have always felt that the vision of life is that – We should all try to live as long as we can, as well as we can and have a short but glorious ending. Our society should be designed to support this perspective such that aging is not the period of life where we wind down physically and mentally, but one where we and society gets the most benefit of our lifetime of experiences and where we can make some of our most impactful contributions.
What excites you most about the future of public health?
The need for health promotion, health protection, disease prevention and control are not going away. Disease and injury happen in any human society, and someone must have the responsibility to be the chief health strategist. So public health will be forever needed. Our central task for the future is to remind people that longevity does not happen by accident, it is earned through ensuring health people in health communities and selling them on the best way to achieve it.
Join us on Tuesday, September 30, 2025 at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, DC as we celebrate “Trust, Empowerment, and Healthy Aging,” at our annual Heroes in Health Celebration. Registration is now open to purchase tickets. To learn more about awards dinner, visit our event page.
