{"id":2271,"date":"2009-04-13T19:36:28","date_gmt":"2009-04-13T19:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2271"},"modified":"2009-04-13T19:36:28","modified_gmt":"2009-04-13T19:36:28","slug":"throwing_money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2271","title":{"rendered":"Throwing Money At The Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8220;yes&#8221; to both questions, then you could find yourself on the receiving end of a <a href=\"http:\/\/economix.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/04\/10\/designing-a-new-health-care-system\/#comments\">$10 million prize<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>Like the Economix blogger who first posted this story, I&#8217;m not sure what kind of incentive this prize is supposed to provide. Fixing health care isn&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;t think they hand out prizes for that kind of grunt work. <\/p>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.zemanta.com\/pixy.gif?w=695\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8220;yes&#8221; 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 <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2271' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-AD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}