Throwing Money At The Problem

Are you a policy wonk with dreams of fortune and glory? Have you been feverishly working on a brilliant plan to restructure the American health care system? If you answered “yes” to both questions, then you could find yourself on the receiving end of a $10 million prize, courtesy of the X-Prize Foundation and health insurer Wellpoint. The X Prize Foundation previously handed out a $10 million dollar prize to a group of engineers and entrepreneurs who achieved the first privately funded spaceflight.

Like the Economix blogger who first posted this story, I’m not sure what kind of incentive this prize is supposed to provide. Fixing health care isn’t an engineering problem. Plenty of ideas have been put forth; the problem is one of persuasion. Plenty of vested interests, including Wellpoint, stand to lose something if health care reform passes and it’s going to take a whole lot of people making a whole lot of phone calls and writing a whole lot of e-mails to convince Congress to muster the political will to stand up to those interests. I don’t think they hand out prizes for that kind of grunt work.