A chicken for every doc

Being stupid has never been a disqualification for holding public office in America.

Idiots of all parties and persuasions have held every office in the land, from selectman to President, and Democrats have sent their fair share of dunderheads to Washington too.

But lately it’s looking as though the Republicans are actively recruiting blockheads.

 

Considering the Party’s offering nothing to anybody worth less than several million a year, and not much to those few who are---“Count on us to cut your taxes, remove regulations that cost you money, and to destroy the economy and with it your business!  Whoops!  Did we say that last part out loud?”---and since what little they do have to offer mostly involves screwing over the rest of us, which if word got out would not be popular at the ballot box, they have to lie non-stop about what they think, what they want, what they’re planning, and what they’re up to.  Under the circumstances, recruiting blockheads is good politics.  Talented liars are a rare breed and they charge an arm and a leg.  Easier and cheaper to find morons who actually believe the nonsense the Party wants them to spout.

So here we have Sue Lowden, the Republican candidate for Senator for Nevada, saying, with apparent faith in the soundness of her own thinking about how to control health care costs:

You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor.

Hard to say what Lowden thinks she’s thinking here, because it isn’t a real thought, it’s more of a memory burp of the kind she’s too young to be having.

Is she advocating that doctors stop demanding cash for their services and accept payment in kind instead?

Is she trying to suggest that a trip to the doctor’s shouldn’t cost more than the price of a chicken and is that a live chicken or a Perdue Oven Stuffer Roaster?

Has she thought about what would happen if people did start paying doctors in kind?   In them olden days before we “started having health care”---Landon’s obviously studied at the Sarah Palin School of Eloqution---one or two chickens a week helped the doctor and his family eat.  But doctors saw a lot fewer patients back then.  Now some see twenty-five a day.  That’s a lot of chickens.  If we brought back the olden days it would turn doctors into poultry farmers and they would have to cut back on their doctoring to spend time taking their chickens to market, presumably in those flatbed trucks with beds stacked high with rickety cages that always get run off the road by the main characters’ speeding car in screwball comedies.  All those sorrowful looking drivers standing by the wreckage of their trucks watching the feathers waft down around them were doctors, I guess.

And how old are Lowden’s grandparents anyway?   Her webpage doesn’t give her age, but she was Miss New Jersey in 1973, so she’s probably in her mid to late 50s.  That would mean her grandparents were likely born in the early 1900s.  Possibly the late 1890s, if Lowden is one of their youngest grandchildren.

Not too much older than my grandparents then, and I can tell you, my grandparents’ did not pay their doctors bills with chickens.  My grandmother’s father sold insurance, including health insurance.  His clients were “having health care” in 1910.

My grandparents lived their whole lives in the 20th Century, you know, when people had cars and electric lights and televisions and saw men land on the moon.  Whose olden days are we harkening back to?

There was a period in the 20th Century that resembled the olden days Lowden’s wistful for.  My grandparents often talked about it.  They called it the Depression.

Apparently Lowden doesn’t know that the reason some people in the olden days paid their doctors in chickens---or vegetables or apples or buckets of milk—or by working it off is that they were broke.  They didn’t have the money to pay in cash.  The olden days she’s wishing us back to were in fact hard times.

Here’s the thing about the olden days.  They last into the future.

And today reaches back deep into the past.

Large patches of the country did not have electricity until the 1930s (Lowden, being a good Republican, would probably count the TVA as one more example of how the New Deal didn’t work.) and those trucks full of chickens are still on the roads. 

The future started last week.

And it started a hundred years ago.

When I was a kid it was possible to live in the 1920s and for all intents and purposes various older relatives and their neighbors still did.

It takes a long time for the past to become the past, as opposed to eccentric puddles in the present.  It persists in the memories of people who weren’t alive in it because those memories are hand-me-downs from people who were. 

I “remember” the Depression because my grandparents remembered it out loud around me.  Lowden “remembers” the olden days because her grandparents remembered what their grandparents had told them about what their grandparents had told them.

Memory is partial.  It gets colored by regret and nostalgia.  It’s often not even made of memories.  It’s assembled out of images and incidents we’ve been told about or that we read about or saw in movies and on TV or conjured up out of dreams.  And it’s useful.  It lends itself to convenient re-editing.

What Lowden is failing to remember about the olden days is that in the olden days when some doctors were forced by their patients’ poverty to accept payment in kind the doctors didn’t feel comfortable pressing for anything more because they were often being paid for letting someone die.

In the olden days, doctors rarely cured anybody.

They could fix some things.  Set a broken bone.  Sew up a cut.  Salve a burn.

When they cured, they mainly cured by removing and then hoping they’d got it all.

Mostly, though, what doctors were paid to do was to treat symptoms and give comfort and the benefit of their experience while waiting for nature to take its course, and that meant far more often in the olden days than it does now standing by and murmuring kind words while watching someone, not unusually a child, die.

When the Republicans weren’t screwing up the health care reform debate with out and out lies and shameless fearmongering, they were confusing people by talking about our health care system in two contradictory ways, as if every doctor’s office and hospital was the Mayo Clinic and as if we were all still living in the not quite so olden days---not the days before penicillin and antibiotics---but the 1950s and 60s when most doctors were family doctors and made house calls, which they could do because they had time.  They saw fewer patients.

What’s more, because they had fewer patients, they needed smaller support staffs.  They could get by with a single nurse who acted as receptionist, secretary, and bookkeeper, and she---always a she---worked cheap, because she was a she and because in many cases she was related to the doctor.

Costs need to be controlled, not that the Republicans have suggested any realistic methods for control.  One thing they could do, if they were serious, is acknowledge why costs are high.  They could stop pretending it is or they think it ought to be like the olden days.

First, it costs a lot more to run a doctor’s office these days.

And second…

It costs a lot of money to cure people.

Doctors still have to stand by and murmur kind words while watching a patient die, but the doctor and the patient haven’t gotten to that point together until after batteries of tests, operations, and rounds of expensive drugs, and the reason for all that expenditure of time, resources, expertise, and money is that other patients have been cured by the same treatments, efforts, and expenditures.

Cured!

Someone should ask Sue Lowden how many chickens a parent should bring to the clinic to pay for their child’s next round of chemo.

"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."

They should ask her if the parent has to offer to paint the nurses’, the technicians’, the consulting physicians’, and the orderlies’ houses too.

They could paint the hospital’s corridors too.  That should just about cover it.  Don’t you think?

Hat tip to Greg Sargent.

Comments

[Sherri]

According to her website, Lowden began her career as a teacher - what does she think teachers should be paid with? Apples? (the eating kind, not the computing kind.) Then she became a TV reporter; perhaps the station should have offered to paint her house in lieu of paying her a salary.

[Victoria]

What's amazing - according to Talking Points Memo today - is that her campaign seems to be standing resolutely by the stupidity.

You know, I'm too young to have had this experience, but when I was in college I went to an M.D. - a really excellent one, an actual healer - who did accept produce for service. This was in Lancaster, PA - Amish country - and inevitably I would find myself sitting in the waiting room next to some Amish lady with a bushel of apples or potatoes by her chair. The whole office smelled like a farmstand.

The doctor was a homeopathic M.D. in his late sixties at the time, I'm guessing - maybe older, for whom an office visit cost $7.00, or anyway that's what he charged me, a college student who lived three doors down from his office. During the talk phase of your visit, he would sit at a distance and seem to be studying not just your body but the air around your body. Then he would do whatever exam he felt was needed. Then he would give you a treatment, in which he usually did a massage all along the spinal column, but there were other elements as well. I would say he never gave me less than an hour of full attention. And sometimes he would send me home with a homeopathic remedy - those could run up to a whole $5.00. Years later, I heard from someone who took a workshop from him in Philadelphia that he taught practitioners how to "read the aura." Oh! So that's what was up with the gaze!

Doc Williams and his wife lived alone in a house downtown with a huge organic garden in back, so they didn't really need the food. Instead, they would host huge weekly dinners for students, Quaker groups, social justice activists, and others. Mrs. Williams was forever getting herself in jail for one protest or another.

So yeah, if we had more doctors like this...

And if pigs had wings...and if Lowden had any business running for office...

I loved your take on this. You managed to capture all the key points. Thanks.

[Anne D.]

Lance,

This is the funniest post you have written. Also, many insightful points were made. Maybe Lowden was inspired by the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, where Atticus Finch was paid with food by some of his clients. The book was set in hard times you speak of, the Depression. Like Sherri mentioned, what would Lowden do with a basket of apples?

[sfmike]

I loved Victoria's Amish/Quaker Aura Healer story, not to mention the tart punchline.

[Ken Muldrew]

This is even crazier than the Deadwood libertarians! It's so crazy that I'm not even sure what Lowden sees as the problem that would be addressed by paying doctors with chickens. Is money the problem? Does she think we should return to an early-modern economy based on credit (in the Ben Franklin sense, "The most trifling Actions that affect a Man's Credit, are to be regarded. ... [etc.]")? Is she a Marxist who despairs that our economy leaves no other transaction between man and doctor than naked self interest and callous cash payment? Does she just think that doctors are paid too much and that by forcing them to accept their fees in made chicken we could bring them back down to subsistence wages?

I'd go with your memory burp theory but if the campaign is sticking to this plan, as Victoria indicated above, then there must be some thought behind this proposal (lunatic though it may be).

[joel hanes]

Over at Jesus' General, Gen. J.C. Christian is promoting an effort to contribute donations in kind to Lowden's election campaign -- one can donate live chicks, eggs, and appropriately, bovine manure.

[MaryRC]

My grandfather died of pneumonia when my mother was a little girl. Pneumonia. He was in the prime of life, a big healthy guy. It was the defining moment of her life. She adored him. She remembers being taken to his bedside to say goodbye. He was unconscious and breathing stertorously. There was nothing they could do -- they just had to give up and wait for the end. It was the end of so many things for her. The bank foreclosed on the business and they nearly lost the house as well. Forget about college, she had to quit high school after grade 10 and get a job. She lost her father to something that a healthy man can shake off today in a few days.

So to hell with the olden days, "before we all started having health care". To hell with them.

[Lance]

MaryRC,

My grandmother's story is remarkably similar. Her father, the insurance man, died of congestive heart failure when she was 16. If he were alive today, he'd be alive today.