Gerhard Kocher

Gerhard Kocher was born on 7 February 1939 in Bern, Switzerland. After obtaining a commercial Matura, he studied economics and political science at the University of Bern and at the Free University of Berlin, completing his licentiate in Bern in 1964.

He received his doctorate in political economy (Dr. rer. pol.) from the University of Bern in 1966. His dissertation, published in 1967 as Verbandseinfluss auf die Gesetzgebung, examined how the Swiss medical association and the health insurance federations influenced the 1964 partial revision of the federal health and accident insurance law. It became a reference work on interest groups in Swiss health policy and went into a second edition in 1972.

After his studies Kocher worked for Tradax, the Geneva based subsidiary of the American trading company Cargill, and from 1968 to 1974 he was secretary of the Swiss Office for Trade Promotion, OSEC, in Zurich, now known as Switzerland Global Enterprise.

In 1970 he founded the Swiss Association for Futures Studies together with the ETH Zurich economist Bruno Fritsch. The association, now called swissfuture, joined the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences in 1976. Kocher served as its secretary and edited its journal Zukunftsforschung from 1972 to 1995.

From 1974 he worked as an independent consultant and publicist, mainly on health care and futures research. In 1976 he founded the Swiss Society for Health Policy (SGGP) and served as its central secretary until 2002, also editing its bulletin Gesundheitspolitische Informationen. The SGGP book series he edited had published 117 volumes on the health system by 2013. With the health economist Willy Oggier he edited several editions of the handbook Gesundheitswesen Schweiz, and with the Geneva physician Pierre Rentchnick he wrote Chère médecine (1979), published in German as Teure Medizin (1980), a call for targeted reform of the Swiss health system.

He held many voluntary roles, including honorary president of the Swiss Association for Patient Interests, board member of the Swiss Medicines Information Centre, president of the Equam Foundation for quality in medical care and member of the Federal Commission for Tobacco Prevention. He organised more than 100 conferences on health policy.

Kocher lived in Muri bei Bern with his wife, Marianne Kocher-Nyffeler. Alongside his professional writing he was a keen aphorist. His collection Vorsicht, Medizin!, first published in 1996, gathered 1555 aphorisms and thoughts on medicine, health care and health policy, and its expanded third edition of 2006 added 88 cartoons. His sayings are collected on Wikiquote and in the German Aphorismen-Archiv. His family chose one of them for his death notice: what matters is not how old you are, but how you are old.

Gerhard Kocher died on 2 November 2026, aged 87. His death was announced by his family in notices in the Berner Zeitung, Der Bund and the Tages-Anzeiger on 14 November 2026, which described him as a health economist. The place and cause of death were not made public. He was buried in a private family ceremony at the Schosshalden cemetery in Bern, and instead of flowers the family asked for donations to swissfuture and the Swiss Society for Health Policy, the two organisations he had founded.

Kocher is regarded as one of the pioneers of health policy analysis in Switzerland. The Swiss Society for Health Policy he founded became a long running forum bringing together doctors, insurers, hospitals, politicians and patients, and his handbooks and book series shaped how a generation of Swiss professionals understood their health system. As a co-founder of swissfuture he also helped establish futures studies as a field in Switzerland. He received the badge of honour of the German medical profession from the German Medical Association in 2001 and the Swiss Health Economics Prize of the Swiss Association for Health Economics in 2007.