Before Roger Marshall became a U.S. senator, he spent decades practicing medicine as an obstetrician-gynecologist in Kansas. During that time, his medical practice took an unusually aggressive approach to collecting unpaid bills, according to a New York Times examination of Kansas court records.
Marshall and his medical practice filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients who owed money for medical care. In 81 of those cases, patients were arrested after failing to appear in court. Lawyers for Marshall's practice sought arrest warrants in additional cases, although the available records do not establish whether those patients were ultimately arrested.
The cases involved bills ranging from thousands of dollars to amounts as small as $101. Marshall's practice also pursued wage and bank-account garnishments and routinely charged patients 18 percent annual interest on their debts.
Among those sued were women who owed money for childbirth and other medical care. Many of the patients lived in Barton County, a rural part of Kansas with higher-than-average poverty and uninsured rates. Some lacked health insurance, while others had coverage but still had to pay portions of their medical bills.
One case involved Joe Vasquez and his wife. After his wife underwent an emergency hysterectomy, the couple was sued over a $4,561 medical bill. When they failed to appear in court, an arrest warrant was issued. Police arrested the couple during Easter weekend in 2007, and they spent two days in jail before their son was able to borrow money to secure their release.
The lawsuits were filed both in Marshall's name and under Heartland Regional OBGYN, the practice he owned. Marshall operated the practice himself from 1998 to 2012 and later co-owned it with another physician.
The records provide a very different picture of Marshall's medical career from the one emphasized in his political biography. His campaign website features his 25 years as an OB-GYN and says he delivered more than 5,000 babies.
Now seeking reelection to the Senate, Marshall's history of aggressively pursuing patients over medical debt is resurfacing as a major part of his pre-political record.
Marshall is inadvertently proving that America's healthcare system is direly broken. In this economy, and with a failed healthcare system that Republicans keep chipping away at, average households are just a health care crisis away from bankruptcy. GoFundMe donation pages shouldn't be how Americans get help with staggering medical bills. Too many Americans rely on that (I did, too). It's not uncommon.
The Commonwealth Fund's comparison of 10 high-income democracies—Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S.—found that all nine countries other than the U.S. had universal coverage. So politicians in this country can't seem to do what other countries have done for years.
And Marshall sued his own patients. The Republican healthcare plan is simple: pay up, go to prison, or die.
