And how about we pay our leaders in livestock??

By now, of course, you’ve no doubt heard that Nevada Republican Senatorial candidate Sue Lowden has proposed allowing Americans to barter for their health care. Really. Seriously. As much as I’d like to say that Lowden is punking all of us, she’s dead serious about her plan. After all, “back in the old days”, people used to take a chicken to their doctor, so why shouldn’t the same sort of idea work today?

Never mind the absurd mental picture created by the idea of residents of the most powerful country in the world paying for their health care in chickens (something your average Norwegian or Canadian hardly has to worry about). Never mind that it’s difficult to deposit a chicken in a bank account. And don’t even consider than making change could be a bit…um, messy. All Lowden has really done is to make herself a target for every late night comedian and pundit from Ciudad Juarez to Halifax…and she deserves every hit she takes.

Of course, this being da Interweb, some kind souls took it upon themselves to take this idea and run with it. They’ve provided a handy calculator to help determine how many chickens it will take to pay for specific medical procedures:

Epic comedic value aside, how sad is it that here in the most powerful nation in the world a politician is seriously proposing that Americans barter for their health care as if we were a Third World country? If this represents the sort of principled Conservative leadership that Lowden has to offer, and Nevadans vote for her, they’ll have only themselves to blame.

In the meantime, I’m going to hope that I never need bypass surgery, because I have NO idea how I’d manage to come up with 4,482 chickens…or where I’d put them.