Gary Tetz

How’s the crowd-funding campaign to buy new televisions for residents going at that Pennsylvania nursing home? Pretty well, it appears. More than 60 have been ordered, and soon the soothing sounds of Matlock and Fox News will be echoing down every corridor.

You’re familiar with the concept of crowdfunding, I’m sure. Among other uses, it’s how desperate friends and family members these days try to cover the gap between what big insurance companies will pay and what cancer actually costs to treat.

It’s sad they have to resort to that, but it’s nice to know people always help do the right thing when shareholders won’t. The way things are headed, someday all of long-term care might need to be paid for like that.

Crowdfunding isn’t the only way to raise money for a good cause, of course. Nudity is also an ever-attractive option. Residents of an assisted living community in Ohio decided to pose strategically naked for a 2015 calendar, with the proceeds going to the local Kiwanis Club to buy shoes for children.

Apparently it’s working, as a second printing has been ordered. If you’d like your own copy and have an extra $12 you haven’t already committed to a crowd-funding campaign, just contact the facility.

It’s a bold, brave and inspiring idea, and I wish I had a dime for every time a representative of a worthy cause has asked if I’d consider being nude on its behalf. The only thing that keeps me from selflessly dropping my robe for a glossy long-term care benefit calendar is the knowledge that every penny raised would have to first cover intense psychological interventions for all who purchased it. So the whole exercise seems kind of pointless.

Maybe a better way for me to support the profession I love would be an innovative hybrid of the two. I think I’ll simply set up a crowdfunding campaign that threatens to indiscriminately distribute my naked calendar if the goal isn’t reached by a predetermined date.

It’s a genius idea. Who wouldn’t pay $12 to prevent that?

Things I Think is written by Gary Tetz, a national Silver Medalist and regional Gold Medal winner in Humor Writing in the 2014 Association of Business Press Editors (ASBPE) awards program. He has amused, informed and sometimes befuddled long-term care readers worldwide since his debut with the former SNALF.com at the end of a previous century. He is a multimedia consultant for Consonus Healthcare Services in Portland, OR.