Hey there, Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS), how was the weekend? Attended the Kansas State Fair, did you? Debated the Democratic nominee running to unseat you? Got lustily booed for your habit of suing indigent patients who couldn’t pay their medical bills because hey, sorry about your miscarriage, ma’am, but Dr. Marshall has a boat payment to make?
If you missed it last week, The New York Times ran a long piece about Marshall’s habit, when he was a practicing OB-GYN, of suing patients and in some cases having them arrested if they couldn’t pay their bills. Sometimes he got courts to garnish patients’ wages and bank accounts. He charged patients an 18 percent annual interest rate on overdue bills. Some of these bills were as little as $100.
We suppose he could try defending that usurious interest rate by saying that at least it wasn’t as high as people would have paid if they put their emergency hysterectomies on their credit cards. Isn’t American healthcare neat?
Experts told the Times that these practices were “on the extreme side” and “an extreme case.”
Marshall got booed for a lot of things during the debate this past weekend against challenger Adam Hamilton, a mild-mannered pastor who in a better world would be running away with this election. But the medical bill thing stood out for his fumbling, awkward defense, which we admittedly had to strain to hear over the boos starting around the 4:34 mark here:
Man, look at how white Marshall’s teeth are. They’re so white they probably have their own country club membership.
“One out of five patients we saw at our hospital got free care ... But we also had a business. We had 300 employees. We had a mortgage payment. We had electric. So we had just like every other business, we had the common business practice at the end of the day turn some people to collections as well. That would be true of every hospital and every doctor ... We would go a year before we would ever send somebody over.
Then there was some yammer about how The New York Times didn’t report all the great things he did, like taking Medicaid patients. It went unmentioned that Marshall voted for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that enacted the most severe Medicaid cuts ever, some $665 billion. So if Marshall thought he wasn’t getting paid before, imagine what he’ll think if he restarts practicing medicine after he loses the election.
Marshall closed by stating that the whole piece was a “hit job paid for by his confidant, Chuck Schumer,” an incredibly awkward attempt to imply a close relationship between Adam Hamilton and the Democratic Senate leader.
But what interested us is that Marshall didn’t realize, because he is a Republican and does not have the brains that God gave the common turnip, that he was explaining why American healthcare sucks in the first place: Because we treat it like a business, one where there is always plenty of competition and providers have to keep lowering their prices in order to stay afloat in a crowded market.
Because how many times have we heard Republicans suggest if you don’t like the price a hospital is charging you for surgery, you should shop around until you find a hospital that charges less? Because A) everyone has that kind of time, and B) everyone has so many doctors and hospitals nearby to haggle with.
It’s this last one that Marshall knows well. According to the Times, most of his patients lived in Barton County, which has “above-average uninsured and poverty rates.” These people don’t have anywhere else to go. If your livelihood is so dependent on their ability to pay, you might need to find another livelihood.
Or do what a dipshit Republican Senate candidate did in Nevada in a 2010 primary and suggest bartering chickens for medical care. She lost the primary by 14 points.
The crowd at the debate was clearly pro-Hamilton, but if it is at all indicative of the voters’ attitude towards Marshall, he might be in a lot more trouble in November than we would have thought.
OPEN THREAD.
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So you guys know that sometimes my movie night selections seem to reflect current events, this month we are doing vampire movies
Bela Lugosi is dead but apparently Mitch is not.
Some vampires can go out into sunlight.
How does Mitch feel about garlic?
WHERE IS DEAD WELFARE QUEEN MITCH MCCONNELL???