Davos, Jan 20 || Amid rising costs and declining quality in healthcare systems worldwide, experts at the ongoing World Economic Forum (WEF) 2026 deliberated on the need to find solutions to break the cost-investment paradox.
During the session, ‘Healthcare: Cost or Investment’, experts discussed how healthcare systems worldwide face an inescapable paradox: spending rises while quality often declines.
Nina Warken, Germany’s Federal Minister of Health, stated that countries must have better healthcare facilities and must also finance them to enable citizens to live a healthy and disease-free life.
Stressing the need to gain citizens' trust in public healthcare, she said that “investment into healthcare is an investment into democracy”.
Stefanie Stantcheva, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University, US, said that costs and investments into healthcare are unique.
“Public policies can play a big role in this because the private market struggles to support healthcare systems due to a range of externalities, which can also affect others,” Stantcheva said.