Weekend Birdery: Chickens for Checkups?
Sue Lowden, Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, suggested last month that people of limited means could pay for medical care by bartering with their doctor—exchanging, for example, a chicken for a check-up.
I suppose it would be nice if folks generally had the kind of relationship with their family doctor that would allow for such informal remuneration. (However, it would probably be best to liquidate the chicken—in either sense of that phrase: cash or soup—before actually visiting the doctor’s office, because a live chicken is not an easily stored medium of exchange, and because exposure to viruses and such would risk serious devaluation of the chicken.)
The problem is that, on average, the cost of an individual’s medical care far outstrips our per capita wealth in poultry. As my chart here illustrates, there is a per capita shortfall of $7,668.74 in poultry assets (at retail equivalent value) versus healthcare expenditures. On the other hand, if we consider only the cost of currently uncompensated care—about $41 billion (according to the New America Foundation), or $134.65 per person—then chicken might just do the trick after all.
However, poor folk are by definition not sitting atop great wealth in assets, feathered or otherwise; and what they do have usually can’t just be traded away. So we have a distribution problem. Jonathan Cohn writes:
A family making $40,000 a year simply can’t find $10,000 to cover out-of-pocket expenses. (That’s a lot of chickens!) Sensible public policy shouldn’t ask people to reduce that health care bill by bargaining with their doctors over prices. It should prevent that kind of financial exposure in the first place.
[...] Unfortunately, private insurance has become increasingly inadequate to this task over the last 20 to 30 years. As the cost of medical care has grown, it’s been harder to find affordable coverage. Insurers haven’t done enough to drive down prices on their own and, in response, they’ve actually fostered the separation of healthy and sick. As a result, more and more people have found themselves in the same situation as those people in the 1920s and 1930s: medical bills they have no way to afford.
Health care reform represents an effort to reverse that trend, by making sure everybody can find an insurance policy and making sure everybody has the money to pay for it.
Or we could redistribute the chicken.
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Chickens for Checkups has it’s own viral YouTube video. Check it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZezfjWox5s