What if we had a health care system instead of a ‘sick care system?’
An imaginary prize inspires this and other questions
In an interesting recent article in the New York Times headlined “Imaginary Prizes Take Aim at Real Problems,” the reporter J. Peder Zane approached a number of MacArthur Foundation fellowship winners—i.e., people who are doing groundbreaking work on various important issues—and asked them the following beautiful question:
If you had a $20 million prize to offer people as incentive to take on a major challenge, what would that challenge be?
I love the idea of using incentives to inspire people to tackle big challenges (the X Prize Foundation, among others, has been doing this for years). And I even like the idea of using an “imaginary prize”—as this article did—just to get people thinking and talking about these issues. In the article, each of the MacArthur fellows came up with a great challenge. Among them: How might we… use crowd-sourcing to help the hearing-impaired? Remove deadly sediments from waterways? Build better bridges?
But the idea that most resonated with me was from Rebecca Onie, a 2009 MacArthur Fellow who runs Health Leads, an organization that helps needy people to access health care services. Onie’s $20 million challenge: “Design a true health care system.” As she points out in the Times article, what we currently have is a “sick care system” that devotes almost all of its resources to treating patients after they become ill. What we desperately need, Onie notes, is a new system that is focused more on prevention and keeping people out of hospitals.
How might we begin to create such a system? It’s one of the big questions I plan to address in the book (possibly with input from Onie, as well as a number of other creative thinkers and master questioners currently working in the health care field). And in the meantime, I’d love to hear any ideas (or beautiful questions, of course) that readers may have on this subject.
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Warren on the web