From “The New England Sampler”, compiled and edited by John Fleischman
Yankee Magazine
For use with permission from Yankee Publishing, Inc. appeared in Yankee Magazine, June 2000.
Will Work for Surgery
When 60 year-old Della O’Leary couldn't pay the $8,000 bill from her gallbladder operation at Maine’s Franklin Memorial Hospital, she was loathe to have the bill simply written off. Fortunately, Franklin Memorial offered Della another option: barter.
Called “Contract for Care,” the hospital’s barter program allows patients to work off hospital bills they cannot otherwise pay, by volunteering their services. It’s an old solution to a very modern problem, and it has worked particularly well for Franklin Memorial. The hospital in Farmington serves a poor, rural community. Unemployment hovers around 8 percent and one-fifth of the population has no health insurance.
Under the barter plan, Della paid off her gallbladder surgery as a part-time receptionist. Nancy Cameron Dickinson planted a flower garden to pay for her fallopian-tube surgery. Bo Jesperson volunteered in the same emergency clinic that treated him after a motorcycle accident. Other partients have painted walls and baked for the hospital auxiliary’s bake sale. Friends and family can also work on a patient’s behalf to repay medical debts.
Since the pilot program in 1997, the Contract for Care program has allowed 60 patients to receive not only a clean bill of health but also a bill paid in full.