The barter system has been around for thousands of years.  Just because it may now be linked to modern medical services, it is somehow laughable? Is it any worse than a lawyer doing a filing for a couple of car detailing jobs? A tv station manager getting a car for personal use by putting commercials on the air for a dealership? How about the dentist who gives a discount if one uses cash? This goes on all the time and is not considered laughable at all. Maybe it’s the sky high costs of paying for anything in the health care system that makes bartering items like chickens seem ridiculous. But is it?

The real underlying issue with any “trade” agreement is the valuation of goods or services to be traded and how desperate the need is for those services. Yes, it’s about supply and demand. The “free-marketeers” are ecstatic!

Only this time the product in play is healthcare. Maybe life or death. Not really something to joke about.

For Democrats to ridicule the possibility that bartering goods and services as a way for someone to get much needed  help, risks painting them as insensitive and "out of touch" with the real economy as the Republicans.  So, time for a little econ 101.

My toilet is broken. I need a plumber. I have little cash. I skate close to the limit on my credit card.

If my plumber would like a website written and designed, does he need it as badly as I need to have the gushing brown water stopped in the bathroom? While I may value my services at $500, he may see them only as worth an hour of his time at $65 (after all, he can get his good natured computer savvy nephew or cousin to make the ad). So what, really, is the value of my service at that moment as I stand ankle deep in brown smelly water? What is the value of his?

Nothing frosts me more than when someone perches themselves on any level to judge the value of another’s work. “Oh that’s a low skill, low education level job and really shouldn’t be paid much more than minimum wage.” Maybe it’s a home healthcare worker who comes in daily to make sure a client gets his/her meds, is clean, comfortable and safe. “For $10/hr? Well, they should do the dishes, laundry and tidy up too. I mean, c’mon, it’s not rocket science.”

I often wonder if they’d feel that way were they incapacitated, lying in their own soiled bed linens and waiting for that non-rocket scientist to arrive. Would they see that worker’s value as $10/hr at that moment? Could that worker not stand over the client and say, “No, today I want $30/hr?”

Of course they could simply find someone else willing to do it for $10. Hopefully they can dial a phone to find someone maybe that day. But what if they can’t? “Will you take $10 cash and a pair of earrings?” Most likely result? Someone smiles in the mirror at new gold hoops. Someone gets a clean ass.

This has become the economy we’re in. It’s as raw and ruthless as that. It’s the economy that medical professionals, long insulated from the real economy by insurance companies and the perception of stature as workers, now need to address. People need their services desperately but often don’t have adequate means to pay in a tender doctors can readily change into a set of goods/services they may want or need later on.  The need is there. The payment is there (a good or service offered by the patient).

What isn’t there is currency, the bridge between service and service. Don’t have cash? Maybe someone will let you have some buying power anyway if you pay extra…that’s credit.

Here is current economic reality: There is a manipulated scarcity of Federal Reserve notes (currency).  Credit now seems only go to those who don’t need it. Prices for daily life have been rising and wages paid in Fed notes have not.  I personally think this is the way that Wall Street holds America hostage so that regulation of its risky ways does not occur…but that’s the subject of another post someday.

Today even top level, well educated professionals are being forced to look at the real value of their goods and services and what is and what is not payment. And they are facing choices they haven’t had to face before. If I’m not getting my usual rate, do I turn the work down or go with what I can get? It has become a test of character, for sure. Did I become a doctor to make money or treat the sick? Did I become a lawyer to seek justice for clients, or just get paid? Did I become a stock broker to help my clients make money or to collect a sales commission?

For those with no cash or credit, questions abound as well. How can I get what I need when I don’t have enough cash or credit? What can I sell to get cash to pay for care? I have skills but how much “unpaid” work am I willing to do to get something I and my family really need? Exactly what can I do, what am I willing to do to take care of an immediate need?   

For all of us, Lowden’s words about bartering livestock for medical services are a call to take a good hard look at who we are, what we expect and what we think we are worth. It’s a good time to think: really, what skills or services do I have that could get any desperately needed service from anyone else? Will my dentist fill my aching tooth if I provide long term public policy planning for him? Will my baker give me bread if I put insurance codes into a computer for him or consult him on how better to manage his 3 workers? Would he give me a loaf of bread if I swept and tidied up? And am I willing to sweep the sidewalk too? How hungry am I or my family?

How tied to those Federal Reserve notes has my life become? What exactly would I do, could I do without those Federal Reserve notes? 

What am I really willing to do to get what I and my family need to stay alive?

Those are certainly not questions at which to laugh. The Democratic Party would do better to acknowledge that while poultry may not be the route to take, the shambles left by the shenanigans on Wall Street have put all of us in that sorry position of having to consider those questions. Snark is not the way to go on this.

Btw, the website looks nice. Bathroom is back in order. It took him 20 minutes.