Of a Late Summer Evening

I was poking haphazardly at kitchen chores until I got a phone call with extensive instructions.

"Yes,Chef," I said, and hung up. No other answer is satisfactory.

Complaining about the mess I find in the kitchen would be like complaining about the mess a brilliant surgeon leaves in the operating room.

Then it hit me: another novel approach to health-care financing.

Remember the old cliche about washing dishes in a restaurant if you find yourself embarrassingly short of funds? How about you clean up the operating room or doctor's office or other facility where you received medical care? You can have time to recover from your procedure, of course. Or perhaps you can pay in advance by tidying up after a few appendectomies before you get your turn.

We need to work on the exchange rate of course. And you'd be stepping on the toes of the cleaning staff currently employed wherever you plan to get your work done. But if a governor of a state can prove her working class sympathies by putting a chef and a flight crew out of work, we can heave a whole legion of custodial workers in order to conscript the sickly to pull their weight a bit more in the health care arena.

Time to go eat. An' I helped!