Essay Contest Announcement
We are very excited to be running our fourth sprint at the Boyd Institute, and want to thank everyone who has continued engaging with us into this next phase, this time on the topic of healthcare. As Peter Banks laid out in his recent sprint announcement, we’re continuing to double down on Boyd being a platform that surfaces perspectives from every corner of the broader conversation on a given issue — from ordinary young Americans to subject matter experts and policy wonks.
For too long, policy conversations have been gated by credentials and prestige. But the truth is that mounting a legitimate argument on how an issue in society should be handled has just as much to do with the pedigree of the person making the argument, as it does ground-level realities — lived experiences, with which the policy commentariat are too often out of tune. The essay contest is an integral part of our mission to bridge that gap.
Over the last three sprints we’ve received over a hundred submissions and awarded over $20k in total to the winners. We’re keeping this pace up, and find ourselves extremely excited to be running it back for a fourth time. We’re especially excited to dig in on a topic in particular that we feel is in desperate need of a reboot: healthcare.
Reorienting the healthcare debate
Basically every serious talking point from every corner of the national healthcare conversation orients around two axes: who should pay for it, and who should run it? Those are real and consequential questions, for sure. But that territory — the public vs. private debate — is so incessantly well-trodden it feels tiresome and almost pointless to even broach.
Internally we nearly converged on this same tendency. For the essay contest, we were leaning towards asking the scoped question of how, specifically, technology and markets could be leveraged to “improve” healthcare. This caused debate between Peter and myself. On one hand, yes, clearly the healthcare system could benefit enormously from more robust pricing paradigms, and regulatory frameworks more conducive to unleashing innovation. But it almost felt like framing our essay contest in this way would have lent itself to the more milquetoast libertarian positions on the issue, like it would have just invoked a reprisal of table stakes arguments.
So we decided instead to fork away from what’s well-mapped, and towards the more ambitious path: approaching an already-broad issue — healthcare — with an even broader question.
“What is missing from the healthcare debate?”
It’s a sneaky question in that it’s almost irreducibly simple, yet to answer it well you have to find whitespace on a canvas that’s been continuously painted on since the middle of the 20th century. It also aligns with our desire to surface bold, asymmetric ideas. And what it means in practice is embracing heterodox thinking. It means reframes, new definitions and conceptualizations, and serious questioning of “unquestionable” premises — such as whether healthcare even is a “human right,” or whether advancements in modern medicine truly explain the lion’s share of increases in life expectancies over time.
We’re explicitly welcoming all of the above in spades, with the very important caveat that, as always, the stronger the claim, the heavier the burden of proof.
How to Participate
As we did for the last two quarters, we are asking people to publish their articles on their own Substack publications as soon as they are ready, and we will reward the best essays at the end of the sprint. The reasoning is the same as before: information silos are bad, and publishing in public lets everyone iterate and learn from one another. It also lets us at Boyd more seamlessly share and promote your ideas directly to our audience of roughly 2,000 Substack subscribers and over 10,000 followers across platforms. With that being said, below are the details surrounding participation in this sprint’s essay contest.
Eligibility:
Human (not AI) entrants aged 18 or older are eligible — one essay per author. The contest is open worldwide, but the focus of this contest is on identifying novel ideas targeted for the United States.
Essays should either be:
Published on the author’s personal Substack account, attributed to the Boyd Institute at the top of the submission, with the link shared via THIS Google form; or
Submitted directly to us as a PDF attachment through the same Google Form. Substack publication is strongly preferred.
Attribution:
We ask you put the following blurb at the top of your article:
This article is part of The Boyd Institute’s essay contest on the issue of healthcare. To learn more about them and the work they do, or for more information on how to submit your own article, click here.
Submission guidelines:
Language: Submissions must be in English.
Original Work: Essays must be original and authored by the entrant.
AI Assistance Disclosure: If you use AI tools to brainstorm or edit your essay, briefly describe how you used them in a note attached to your Google Form submission. Fully AI-generated essays are not permitted.
Deadline: 11:59 PM Eastern Time on Monday, November 30th, 2026. Late entries will not be accepted. We will announce the winners and award prize money in early December.
Top prizes, $2,000 each:
People’s Choice — decided by a March Madness–style bracket competition on Notes. We encourage you to campaign for your own article aggressively.
Boyd’s Choice — internally judged by Boyd in a similar way as the previous top prizes: we’re looking for originality, potential for impact, actionability, and clarity/quality of arguments.
Five categories, $500 each:
Most Engagement — measured by likes on Substack as of the end of the essay contest window, subject to our discretion.
Most Feasible — the idea that could really work, and might actually have a chance of happening.
Most Outlandish — the idea we couldn’t publish but couldn’t stop thinking about.
Least Socialist — awarded with reverence and mild concern regarding the current political climate.
Most Lobbied-Against in Washington — save your prize money for legal fees.
How to submit:
Prepare your essay following the guidelines above.
Either publish the article on your Substack, or prepare a PDF.
Complete the online submission form HERE.
Provide your contact details.
Link to your Substack post or attach your PDF.
Confirm that you have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions.
Ready to share your bold, asymmetric idea? Click the link below to submit your essay.