Please join us in mourning the loss of a great American leader.
Our free-market movement lost a great one recently and a friend, Michael F. Cannon of the CATO Institute, published a terrific tribute to this gracious and talented scholar: Grace-Marie Turner. We join many, many others who mourn her passing five weeks ago from brain cancer.
She was a one-of-a-kind scholar who founded a think tank (the Galen Institute) that focused on developing and sharing free-market health reforms. She was always willing to lend a hand to others, looking for issue experts to share their insights with state policy makers. As Michael says in his blog, “Grace-Marie Turner was such a powerful and constant force in the free-market health care movement, it’s hard to imagine it without her.”
Indeed, it is.
Rest in peace, Grace-Marie.
We are thankful for your life.
You can read Michael’s touching tribute to a life well-lived here.
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Grace-Marie Turner, RIP
By Michael F. Cannon
Cato Institute
Grace-Marie Turner was such a powerful and constant force in the free-market health care movement, it’s hard to imagine it without her. She was at the 1974 hotel-bar meeting where Arthur Laffer explained “the Laffer curve” to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dick Cheney. In 1993, she founded the Health Policy Consensus Group, a decades-long, often grueling project to find common ground among free-market health policy wonks, a task that perhaps only Grace-Marie could execute. (Among her sly devices: baking cookies for the meetings.) In 1995, she founded the Galen Institute, a think tank that fostered market-based health reforms. She served as president and trustee for 30 years until her death on May 29 from brain cancer.
Grace-Marie edited or contributed to multiple books, including Empowering Health Care Consumers Through Tax Reform (University of Michigan Press, 1999), Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything (Cato Institute, 2004), and Why ObamaCare Is Wrong for America (HarperCollins, 2011). She was a frequent guest on C‑SPAN and a witness before congressional committees. She sat on the boards of the Winston Fellowship and the Steamboat Institute and was an advisor to the Catholic Medical Association, Docs4PatientCare, and the Paragon Health Institute. She spoke at multiple Cato events and contributed to Cato Journal.
Grace-Marie authored a column at Forbes and boasted bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and most other publications you can imagine. Washingtonian magazine named Grace-Marie one of “Washington’s 500 Most Influential People” in 2021 (back when it was just the top 250), 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Née Arnett, Grace-Marie hailed from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she began her career as a feature writer for the Albuquerque Journal. A pianist, she counted as her most cherished possession “the diary my father wrote as a B‑17 pilot stationed in North Africa during World War II.” Grace-Marie offered maybe the best career advice I’ve ever heard: “The first place to look for a job is inside yourself, to find what you love to do. That is the best path to success and fulfillment.”
The most hostile room would feel safe the moment I saw Grace-Marie. One of my early mentors in Washington told me the hardest thing about getting old is that people die on you. Losing Grace-Marie is a hard one to take. My heart goes out to her husband, Mark Noyes, and her Galen family. Rest in peace.