Stubborn Sue just won’t let go of bartering

One of the reasons hotelier Sue Lowden lost the 2010 primary for U.S. Senate was her inability to say she’d made a mistake.

After she was caught by a Democratic campaign tracker describing how people used to barter for health care — later her formulation became known as “chickens for checkups” — Lowden could easily have caught herself, said the practice of bartering would never work in a modern health care economy, and moved on.

Instead, she repeated her assertion far and wide, which led to widespread mockery and helped an obviously inferior candidate, Sharron Angle, win the Republican nomination to challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Angle lost the general election to Reid handily, a race most observers said Lowden would have made much tougher.

So, lesson learned, right? Apparently not.

Lowden’s back in politics, running for lieutenant governor against state Sen. Mark Hutchison in another Republican primary. Back on Feb. 24, as she prepared for a live TV debate with Hutchison on Ralston Reports with Jon Ralston, Lowden couldn’t help remarking that people still do, in fact, barter with their doctors for care. (She also remarked that they negotiate lower prices for cash payments, which is not “bartering” as much as it’s “bargaining.” That does happen.)

And now, in an interview with Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith, Lowden is back on message with the bartering thing.

“These days, Lowden laughs easily about all those chicken jokes — and reminds a skeptic that her remark about bartering for health care wasn’t such a bad idea in the wake of the nightmarish rollout of Obamacare,” Smith wrote.

But here’s the thing: We should all of us be skeptics. Bartering is a bad idea, regardless of the problems associated with the Affordable Care Act. Bartering fell out of favor as an economic means of transaction because the double coincidence of needs — the off chance that a person needs almost exactly as much health care as the doctor needs a service that person can provide, such as house painting, landscape maintenance or, yes, chickens — rarely works out. Everyone sees this.

Everyone except Stubborn Sue, who apparently not only doesn’t believe she said anything wrong four years ago, but is intent on having everybody acknowledge the correctness of her long-ago remarks. That kind of stubbornness can be helpful in politics, but it can also be fatal. Lowden should take care she’s leaning to the correct side of that knife’s edge lest she mortally wound yet another campaign with the same issue that killed her last time.