politics: chickens

Sue Lowden, GOP political candidate for the Nevada senate race, has suggested that an effective form of payment for health care services would be a barter system.  Her example was, like, you know, we could exchange a chicken for an annual check up or something.  The good folks over at TPM have been tracking this story, and Josh Marshall has just provided this great link to the Lowden Plan. It takes common medical procedures and calculates how many chickens you'll need.  Get breast cancer, no worries, just bring 3494 chickens.

One or two questions though, since Tyson processes 41.4 million chickens per week, are we going to run them out of business now that we'll be diverting chickens from food processing to health care?  Do we need to raise more chickens?  And what about city dwellers and those pesky no livestock within the city limits ordinances? And, what are those doctors going to end up doing with all that livestock?  Sell them on to Tyson at an inflated price?  Just thinking this through to its logical conclusion here.