Conservative humor is alive and well. Harry Reid's challenger in Nevada, Sue Lowden, strikes comedy gold with her silly "livestock barter" program for doctors:
Sue Lowden (R), the leading Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, recently articulated her vision of how the American health-care system should work. At a local candidate forum, Lowden, a former state senator and chair of the Nevada Republican Party, encouraged Nevadans to "go ahead and barter with your doctor." It would, she insisted, "get get prices down in a hurry."-
"I'm telling you that this works," the Republican candidate explained. "You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor. They would say, 'I'll paint your house.' I mean, that's the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I'm not backing down from that system."
It's a permanent credibility-killer. It's one thing to be a confused, far-right candidate. It's another to be a laughingstock.
Talk about channeling Michael Landon and "Little House on the Prairie." It was a pretty good show at the time, but it did take place in the late 1800s.
If you have a serious illness you might get away with this idea, not with chickens, but by giving up a new BMW or a Rolex, maybe.
Greg Sargent reports that the DCCC has a new website dedicated to Reid's challenger.
That’s the name of a new Web site the DSCC is planning to unveil today in an effort to draw national attention to GOP Senate candidate Sue Lowden, who doubled down this week on her assertion that people should barter with doctors to reduce health care prices, a DSCC spox tells me.
The DSCC’s new Chickens for Checkups Web site — a name that first appeared below on this blog — will allow people to send Lowden a “personalized message asking for her help in finding a doctor for their 19th century illness,” DSCC spox Deirdre Murphy says. It will include a menu of stuff you can choose to barter for treatment.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Murphy says. “Sue Lowden is completely out of touch with reality if she thinks trading chickens for checkups is smart health care reform.”
She just tripled down on the idea and said doctors do support her "chickens for checkups" idea. Lowden certainly has made this a national story now. And I predict there will be some teabagging doctors who will adopt this for awhile, just to back her up as long as they have enough money in the bank to do it.
Is she just cuckoo for cocoa puffs? Sure looks like it.
