To: Mary Cluney who wrote (10661 ) 10/23/2009 3:03:39 PM From: TimF Respond to of 42652 We can go to the moon. We can go to mars. We can fix health care. As I've pointed out a few times here, the types of challenges are not remotely equivalent. 1 - Political and economic problems are different than engineering problems because people have minds of their own. They have their own opinions and agendas and preferences and responses to new initiatives. Trying to treat a political or economic problem like it was a difficult engineering problem is setting yourself up for failure. 2 - Going to the moon is a very specific goal. The achievement of it was somewhat complex (extremely complex by most standards but simpler than the current situation by an enormous amount) but the goal was simple. Reforming medical care and/or medical insurance is a complex serious of goals, each one of which is complex by itself, and most of which are controversial. 3 - Health care in the US is a much larger issue than the Apollo program, or other large initiatives like the Manhattan Project, any future manned mission to Mars, or even (since the war is limited in time and the need for health care is not) WWII. 4 - The moon effort involved a massive increase in resources. It was a toss enough money at a specific problem and you can get results situation. The current health insurance situation is often presented as trying to save money or reign in costs, without getting lower care. Tossing huge amounts of money at it doesn't get you that extra efficiency. It just increases the amount of money spent, and/or changes where the money comes from. If you want to use a space challenge in comparisons to the health care problem, a better one might be creating a situation where access to space is cheap and easy. Then you have an issue of efficiency, rather than just "toss as much money as we can at the problem". But this still falls down for the reasons stated above in #1. Its still an engineering problem.