What Can Health Care Teach Sustainability?

The problems facing health care are in some ways not dissimilar to those of sustainability. After reading Atul Gawande's recent article titled "The Cost Conundrum" in The New Yorker, it seems that both systems would benefit greatly by incentivizing collaboration and quality over exploitation, resource depletion and profiteering.

The medical models Gawande points to as promising include:

• Enable collectives that reward participants with savings from their actions
• Shift regulatory burdens from individual to group (malpractice, fines, etc.)
• Penalize those who don’t form collaborative collectives

Although getting Congress to cooperate with large shifts in regulatory approach in this way seems daunting for health care due to the huge lobbying interests in the game, these strategies might actually prove to be more realistic in environmental regulation, where players (NGO's, energy companies, etc.) are increasingly witnessing the benefits of cooperative action. These strategies would need to sit comfortably alongside traditional enforcement approaches, but incentivizing cooperative models would seem to go much further than protectionism has taken us. These solutions would also need to go beyond cap and trade models (which continue to privilege individualistic behaviors), and into areas of shared liability and tangible penalties for not collaborating.