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The world is shifting from treating disease to extending healthy lifespan. So where does Turkey stand in this transformation?
A recent post by futurist Ufuk Tarhan on the longevity economy and publicly supported longevity infrastructure caught my attention. It triggered the question that sparked this column:
Whose responsibility is it to live a long and healthy life? The state’s, the healthcare system’s, or our own? I suspect the future answer will be: everyone’s — but with different responsibilities.
In recent years, “longevity” has become one of the most popular concepts in the health world. Biological age tests, genetic analyses, wearable technologies, artificial intelligence, supplements and personalized health programs are creating an increasingly large economy. The global longevity market is expected to exceed 740 billion dollars in 2026. Industry players speak, in a broader framework, of an 8 trillion dollar transformation. This growth stems from a structural shift from episodic disease treatment toward proactive, data-driven management of healthy lifespan.
Looking at this economy, it would be wrong to see longevity as just another wellness trend. Societies are becoming aware that we must work to increase the number of years we spend healthy and independent. Science is researching how to extend healthspan just as much as lifespan.
Four Countries, Four Different Lessons
Looking around the world, we see there is no single model for this.
Japan has embedded longevity into everyday life. Nutrition, mobility, social bonds, and staying connected to community life in old age are the invisible parts of the system. Japan’s message is simple: longevity begins not in the hospital, but in life itself.
Singapore, meanwhile, increasingly treats healthy aging as a matter of public policy. Preventive health, screenings, digital health and community-based aging programs are all parts of the same goal. The lesson here is different: healthy aging is too strategic a matter to be left to chance.
Spain reminds us of something else. Alongside the Mediterranean diet, walkable cities, daily movement and strong social relationships are key components of healthy aging. Sometimes the most effective health technology is not a new device, but our way of life itself.
And Turkey?
Over the past twenty years, Turkey has achieved a major transformation in access to healthcare, hospital infrastructure, technology and treatment capacity. According to 2025 OECD data, 99 percent of the population is covered by basic health services. Yet life expectancy in Turkey stands at 77.3 years, 3.8 years below the OECD average. Our preventable death rates are also above the OECD average.
So a new goal lies ahead of us:
To transform from a country strong in treatment into a country equally strong in protecting health.
We see this approach beginning to enter public policy in Turkey more visibly as well. The “Healthy Turkey Century” vision, which has come to the fore under Minister of Health Prof. Dr. Kemal Memişoğlu, aims to turn the health system into one that not only treats disease but protects health before disease occurs. In this direction, strengthening preventive health services, expanding Healthy Life Centers, raising health literacy through the Healthy Life Academy (SAHA), and programs to prevent chronic disease are coming to the fore. The 2025–2028 National Health Literacy Action Plan also explicitly defines “healthy aging” as one of its targeted outcomes. The protocol signed in 2026 between the Ministries of Health and of Family and Social Services aims to bring preventive health and social services together in a more holistic structure.
Turkey’s Second Health Transformation
A significant part of today’s health systems still kicks in only after disease has occurred. Heart disease develops, we treat it. Diabetes emerges, we manage it. We try to catch or treat cancer early. Yet the question for the health economy of the future will be whether we can delay the onset of these diseases by five, ten, even fifteen years.
Treating a person’s diabetes starting at age 50 and delaying its onset until age 65 do not create the same health economy. The real value of longevity for states begins precisely here. That is why our understanding of preventive health also needs to change. Preventive health can no longer be just an annual check-up.
Cardiometabolic risks, cancer screenings, muscle strength, bone health, sleep, nutrition, cognitive performance and mental health should be tracked together as parts of a person’s long-term health story. Artificial intelligence and wearable technologies will also be important tools of this transformation. The future success of the health system will lie not only in diagnosing disease early, but in seeing the risk before disease occurs at all.
What Should the State Do, and What Should We Do?
The state can make the healthy choice easier. It can strengthen primary care, improve screening programs, design healthy cities, combat tobacco use, and identify at-risk individuals earlier through digital health infrastructure.
Hospitals can transform from institutions that merely treat disease into institutions that manage health, and insurers from structures that simply pay the cost of illness into ones that incentivize staying healthy. Even employers can develop policies that support not just their employees’ performance, but their healthy lifespan.
But at the center of this entire system, there is still one person: us.
Because no health system can walk in our place, no health system can quit smoking for us, and no doctor can strengthen our muscles for us. No state can sleep for us. And no longevity clinic, with a few hours of intervention a year, can completely undo the mistakes we make for the rest of it.
The Management of Health Now Rests With the Individual
I have been in the health sector for more than 35 years. Over this time, I have watched how hospitals, technology and treatment options have changed. Today, I believe one of the biggest transformations in health will be a shift in where responsibility lies.
We know when our car is due for service. We track our financial investments. Our phone reports our screen time every week. So how many of us know our blood-pressure trend over the past five years, our waist circumference, our muscle strength, our sleep quality, our metabolic risk, or our bone health? The health literacy of the future will be, beyond learning the names of all diseases, the ability to read our own health trends.
For Turkey too, perhaps one of the new goals should not be merely raising average life expectancy, but setting a “National Healthy Lifespan” target.
Measuring a society’s health success not only by how long people live, but by whether they reach those years still walking, thinking, producing and living as independently as possible… The new contract of the future health system may be very simple: the state will build the infrastructure that lets us stay healthy.
The health sector will provide the right scientific tools.
Technology will reveal our risks earlier.
And we will take responsibility for our own health.
