Catherine Rampell notes that the X Prize Foundation -- the fine folks last seen awarding $10 million to the inventor able to build a better space ship -- has partnered with the insurance company Wellpoint to offer $10 million to the person with the best idea for redesigning the American health care system. It's a neat idea: Fix health care, win money. Because as you well know, the problem in health care is that there's just not enough money floating around for people with ideas that will enhance the long-term profits of the insurance industry.Rampell is unimpressed. "I’m not sure there’s much left to be discovered in the quest to find ways to restructure the health care system," she writes. "It seems that policy wonks of all stripes agree that our current infrastructure and its rising costs are unsustainable. And it also seems that just about every possible alternative system is already on the table. But the stakeholders just can’t agree on which permutation to choose, mostly because some faction is always ideologically opposed to the means needed to get to any particular end."I don't think all the relevant stakeholders are ideologically opposed to certain outcomes. Many of them are also professionally unable to accept them. Wellpoint, for instance, would be rather disadvantaged by a system that no longer required Wellpoint's involvement. So that would seem to bias the contest from the outset. Indeed, it seems the X Prize people are selling off their credibility in order to secure Wellpoint's funding for this stunt. On the other hand, there's a depressing symmetry between this contest and the actual path health reform is going to take. Here, a particular stakeholder is funding a particular organization to come up with a solution. Over in Congress, a lot more stakeholders fund a lot more campaign organizations and the beneficiaries of those campaign organizations will be responsible for coming up with a solution. If anything, there's a comforting transparency and reassuring purity to the industry capture in the X Prize contest that the congressional process sadly lacks.Related Policy Idea: Prizes, rather than patents, for drug development. Still a good idea! Still not getting much attention! FIX HEALTH CARE. WIN A PRIZE.
Catherine Rampell notes that the X Prize Foundation -- the fine folks last seen awarding $10 million to the inventor able to build a better space ship -- has partnered with the insurance company Wellpoint to offer $10 million to the person with the best idea for redesigning the American health care system. It's a neat idea: Fix health care, win money. Because as you well know, the problem in health care is that there's just not enough money floating around for people with ideas that will enhance the long-term profits of the insurance industry.Rampell is unimpressed. "I’m not sure there’s much left to be discovered in the quest to find ways to restructure the health care system," she writes. "It seems that policy wonks of all stripes agree that our current infrastructure and its rising costs are unsustainable. And it also seems that just about every possible alternative system is already on the table. But the stakeholders just can’t agree on which permutation to choose, mostly because some faction is always ideologically opposed to the means needed to get to any particular end."I don't think all the relevant stakeholders are ideologically opposed to certain outcomes. Many of them are also professionally unable to accept them. Wellpoint, for instance, would be rather disadvantaged by a system that no longer required Wellpoint's involvement. So that would seem to bias the contest from the outset. Indeed, it seems the X Prize people are selling off their credibility in order to secure Wellpoint's funding for this stunt. On the other hand, there's a depressing symmetry between this contest and the actual path health reform is going to take. Here, a particular stakeholder is funding a particular organization to come up with a solution. Over in Congress, a lot more stakeholders fund a lot more campaign organizations and the beneficiaries of those campaign organizations will be responsible for coming up with a solution. If anything, there's a comforting transparency and reassuring purity to the industry capture in the X Prize contest that the congressional process sadly lacks.Related Policy Idea: Prizes, rather than patents, for drug development. Still a good idea! Still not getting much attention! 
