| Oct. 25, 2003
Canadian dentist wins $10,000 for health care reform
proposal By REBECCA COOK
Associated Press Writer
SEATTLE (AP) _ Does a dentist from Canada have the remedy for
America's ailing health care system?
A team of nine American judges thinks so. At a conference Friday in
Portland, they awarded R. Vaughan Glover of Arnprior, Ontario, a $10,000
prize for his patient-centered proposal to reform health care.
"It's
all based on informing and empowering the patient," said Glover, who
entered the contest out of his frustration with both the current
Canadian and American health care systems.
The
contest was the brainchild of Kathleen O'Connor, a Seattle health care
consultant who wanted fresh ideas on health care and decided to put her
money where her mouth is. She paid for the prize out of her own bank
account, and hopes the ideas from more than 100 entries will help spark
real reform.
"They
were brilliant ideas," O'Connor said Friday. "We've got a health care
brain trust here."
O'Connor got the idea for the contest last year, as she was writing a
book about health care and struggling with the final chapter, titled
"Where do we go from here?" She had a novel idea: Why not ask the
public?
She
did, and the public responded - entries poured in from 32 states and
Canada, from doctors, patients, accountants, homemakers, lawyers,
retirees, students, professors and others.
Glover based his proposal on the patient-centered, team model he uses in
his own practice. "We support the patients, we don't tell them what to
do," he said. He plans to use the $10,000 to hire an editor for the book
he's written based on his ideas, called "Journey to Wellness."
Judges were impressed by the creative, nonpolitically driven ideas in
Glover's entry. Judge Ed Howard, executive vice president for the
Alliance for Health Reform in Washington, D.C., said he appreciated that
Glover included a national, government-funded safety net in his proposal
along with the idea of personal savings accounts - ideas that would
normally come from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
"There was a neat packaging of ideas that might appeal to Democrats and
Republicans and Independents and anyone who cares about health care,"
Howard said. It was hard picking a winner, he said, because all the
entries had such fresh and interesting ideas.
"In
25 years of working on these issues in Washington, D.C., these were
ideas I had never heard of," Howard said. "It was enlightening."
O'Connor hopes for more than simple enlightenment. She will present the
top entries to Washington state's congressional delegation and hopes
some of the ideas will take flight. At the awards presentation, she
launched a new, nonprofit health care reform advocacy group, called Code
Blue Now.
"It
was beyond my wildest dreams," she said of the response to the contest.
"It has been quite an emotional day." |
