Atanu Dey offers a suggestion - inter-generational transfers.

Here is how it works. You go through the course and after finishing the course, you decide at some later time what it was worth to you. Depending on what your valuation of the whole exercise is, you decide whether it is something that is worth doing, and make a donation which goes to support those who will come after you to learn meditation. After all, you learnt meditation because someone before you donated the resources for your instructions and your stay at the center. The current generation’s instructions are made possible by the generosity of previous generation, and the current generation provides the resources for the instructions of future generations.

Here is what I propose as a model for higher education. First, start an institution which will teach qualified students for free and provide those who need a living allowance. Only admit those who promise to give back to the institution according to their means later. And during the years of study, the least the institution can do is to produce human beings who are not only capable of earning a living, but are decent enough to recognize their obligation and fulfill them. If the institution fails in either of these two objectives, the institution does not have a reason for existence and should be allowed to go out of business.

Joh Jordan writes:

There's no question that North American medicine is approaching a crisis. According to the Washington Post, 45 million Americans carry no health insurance. Between 44,000 and 98,000 people are estimated to die every year from preventable medical errors such as drug interactions; the fact that the statistics are so vague testifies to the problem. The U.S. leads the world in health care spending per capita by a large margin ($4500 vs. $2500 for the runners-up: Germany, Luxembourg, and Switzerland), but the life expectancy ranks 27th, near that of Cuba, which is reported to spend about 1/25th as much per capita. Information technology has made industries such as package delivery, retail, and mutual funds more efficient: can health care benefit from similar gains?

The farther one looks into this issue, the more tangled the questions get. Let me assert at the outset that I believe electronic medical records are a good idea. But for reasons outlined below, IT by itself falls far short of meeting the challenge of rethinking health and health care. Any industry with the emotional freight, economic impact, and cultural significance of medicine can't be analyzed closely in a few paragraphs, but perhaps these ideas might begin discussion in other venues.