Sometimes the level of dumb from the right is truly entertaining. The obvious question here regarding this candidate's proposal for controlling health care costs by way of barter is "How many chickens will it take to cover an appendectomy or how many houses to paint for a bypass surgery?"
UPDATE: Oh wait...someone has bothered to make a site that calculates how many chickens for various medical procedures...click the pic for the site.
Top GOP Senate Candidate Lowden Favors "Chickens For Checkups" Health Care Planby Matt Finkelstein
On her campaign website, Sue Lowden (R-NV), the leading Republican challenger to Sen. Harry Reid, lays out four planks of her health care platform: tort reform, purchasing insurance across state lines, small business pools, and portability. Those ideas, of course, closely mirror what congressional Republicans put forward throughout the health care debate. However, Lowden's site fails to mention her fifth -- and most interesting -- idea:
"I'm telling you that this works," the Republican candidate explained. "You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor. They would say, 'I'll paint your house.' I mean, that's the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I'm not backing down from that system."
That's right: Lowden wants to impose a medieval bartering system for health care services.
My new life involves feeding 11 chickens each day, collecting their eggs and shovelling their poop out of the coop about once a week. The eggs are very good but will eventually kill me if I don't add some veggies to my diet. That is where the poop becomes more valuable than the chickens. My dirt is played-out shale/clay and the composted chicken shit is a great source of nitrogen.
I will send the sagacious candidate Lowden a bucket full and ask her what she will swap me for it.
Claiming to establish values of mere things or even the number of dollars that might buy those things on a given day is idiotic if not done in the context of use for those things and immoral if done when the [omitted] context is another human's health, mental or physical.
11 chickens? Not 12? Of course 11 would get you a prime cutlet of chicken at least once.:)
I find it strange that you have become a Mennonite of sorts...what with your credentials intellectually and all. Are you purging something?
Thankfully Lowden's idea is garnering nothing but derision, in the MSM anyway. Where does the right find these morons?