GOP Senator Had His Patients ARRESTED Over Medical Bills

0:00Hey, everybody, it's Tim Miller from the Bullwark. I am continuing the series on the craziest Republicans running around the country, because I think that Republican candidates have been off the chain for like a decade now, and so the mainstream media is bored with covering their crazy. They're more interested in kind of the new breed of crazy that might be arising. And so as a result, like they've got all these statewide candidates running in swing states, or even some red states, this guy I'm going to talk about today, and they don't get a ton of coverage. And so we're covering them here and subscribe to us right now at the Bullwark support what we're doing. This is the one to their fifth in the series, we covered Mike Collins running against John Ossoff in Georgia, Zach Lane, who is the medical device investor from Kansas running for governor of Iowa, Stacy Garrity, election denier extraordinaire, and against Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Andy Biggs, who like literally organized the insurrection, running,

1:02and we've discovered lately, it's like very big on pedophile protection. It's like a key cornerstone of his whole career. He is running against Katie Hobbs for governor of Arizona. So that's a competitive crew, a lot of crazy in Collins Lane, Garrity, and Biggs. But this guy is a special place in my heart when it comes to crazy. He's Dr. Roger Marshall. He's running for Kansas, a senator from Kansas. He's running against pastor Adam Hamilton, who we've had on the show. I thought it was a delightful interview. Sometimes the politician's interviews can be a little stilted. This interview, I thought was great. So we'll put a link to the show now, so I need to know, watch it if you missed it. Why I picked Roger Marshall for this week's edition is there is this big story in the New York Times from Sarah Cliff that looked into some of his behavior when he was a doctor before he ran for senate. And it's pretty shocking. It feels like it's out of the 1800s, the type of what we're doing here.

2:07I mean, it feels like an industrial age type story where a poor worker can't afford a medical treatment. And so the rich evil guy in town agitates to get them jailed. And that's basically what was happening with Roger Marshall, the doctor, if the patients that he served did not fully pay immediately on the timeline that he wanted, he advocated that they'd be put into debtors' prison, which I thought was something that we'd move past as a society, but not the center from Kansas. I want to go through some of this report. He sued 700 patients for medical debts. Of them, 81 have been arrested. 81. And I was like, how is that even possible? Who are the 81? Was he doing medical care for drug treatments and then the people were getting arrested for unrelated issues? Like, no, they went and interviewed these people and they were arrested because they had

3:08bench warrants because Marshall was suing them and they were unable to pay their fine. It didn't show up to court. So it was a literal debtors' prison for medical debt. And Roger Marshall was agitating for that for his fellow Kansas. He needed some of their bank accounts garnished. He was charging patients 18% interest, kind of like payday loan style rates for the local doctor. Some of the unpaid bills were as little as 100 bucks. He was going to court over a Benjamin Franklin among those facing lawsuits. The story opens with this pair of grandparents. They were arrested in their home as their grandchildren were about to start an Easter egg hunt. It was Easter weekend on a police car pulled up to Jo Vazquez's home in rural Kansas. Marshall had fired a lawsuit against him and his wife over unpaid $4,561 bill from her emergency hysterectomy. Three years earlier, they had missed a court date and the doctor's lawyer asked the court

4:11to issue an arrest warrant. The police took the couple into custody as their grandson prepared for the egg hunt. They spent two days in jail before their son could borrow the money to pose bond. Mr. Vazquez said we had no money to pay at the time his wife was working out a manufacturing plant and he was on disability. The best kind of division for the country that Roger Marshall has if you're in rural Kansas. If you're a plant worker and your wife has to have an emergency hysterectomy and you're unable to pay the bills immediately, he's going to send the cops to your house to jail you. He also sued another woman, Kelly Clutz, for $129 from a postpartum visit or baby is nine months old at the time she offered a payment plan for the $129. Marshall's lawyer demanded full payment. Another woman was arrested three times over a C-section bill. It's just such a commitment to life. You've got to really respect the pro-life doctor who so committed to life that he wants a young mother of two young kids jailed because he wasn't fully able to pay her C-section

5:16bill. That's the vision for the country he has and the vision for health care that he has. If you're wondering, okay, maybe Roger's kind of a rural doctor that was struggling in his own right and he really needed this money. His current net worth is between $3.9.8 million and now he lives in Florida according to the Kansas City Star, what he got to the Senate. The Senate, he sold his house in Kansas, nice house, five bedroom, four baths and instead he's living in Sarasota, Florida in a much larger and more expensive house that includes a boat dock. He's out there on his boat in Florida as a senator from Kansas and back in Kansas are people that had been jailed because they couldn't afford the $129 bill for their postpartum doctor visit. That's kind of guy Roger Marshall. In case you want to, you know, maybe the details of this are complicated. And there's something that the New York Times isn't telling us, so the team isn't telling us. Roger Marshall is pretty upfront about his views about how, you know, whether people deserve

6:19health care, whether everybody should get health care, whether for the full health care should be available for everyone. He said in 2017, just like Jesus said, the poor will always be with us. There's a group of people that just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves. He said, they're just like homeless people. I just think morally, spiritually, socially, some people just don't want health care. And I think he should maybe take a second peak at what Jesus was talking about there. I don't think it would, I don't think Jesus was like the poor will always be with us, throw up your hands. So we should do nothing about it. It's, it's been a minute since I was, I read the New Testament. And, you know, in Catholic school, we're more saints people. The Bible reading, not as much. But like, I do know enough about the Jesus's teachings to know that caring for the poor, telling the poor, telling for the sick, what's kind of core tenet there. You know, the notion was not just that like there will always be poor.

7:19So you just get to fly to Florida and build a boat dock and sue the poor and the sick for money they don't have. And if they're not unable to pay you, they have to go to a debtor's prison and leave their two year old and eight month old at home. That wasn't like really kind of the main thrust of Jesus's teaching. Luckily for Roger, he is running against a pastor. So he can kind of both sort of present their visions for what Jesus wanted as far as health care is concerned. From Roger's standpoint, things seem fine. If only people paid a little bit more. And I think he's a little bit unhappy that sick patients with emergency hysterectomy aren't paying enough. And so I think that would be a fix that he's looking to. How could he make sure people can pay more? And I think Adam Hamilton's position on that is a little different. He has an ad out recently where he's trying to roll that back a little bit, you know, get a free position. I think maybe they've seen some stuff in the polling that this isn't that popular, that position, like kind of debtors' prison for medical care isn't that popular.

8:22And so he's new ad, let's just take it quickly. I'm Dr. Roger Marshall and I approve this message. Every day, Dr. Roger Marshall is up early fighting for people who stay up late, worrying about bills, taking on credit card companies and big insurance, fighting for a farm bill that protects Kansas and rural health care and workhorse for Kansas. That's Dr. Roger Marshall. But Adam Hamilton, the woke mega-church CEO, a stocking horse for Schumer and big city liberal, so hate our way of life. To liberal for Kansas. All right. So he says there he's fighting for a farm bill that protects Kansas and rural health care. He's not fighting that hard for all that. He's kind of fighting to do the opposite. You could really call that a lie. The health care funding for rural Kansas that he fought for was one big, beautiful bill. In that bill, there were cuts to Medicaid and the ACA marketplaces.

9:23Result in coverage losses for rural Americans disproportionately. As a result, that then puts strain on rural health care facilities, right? If people and rural communities are losing health care coverage, they're not going to go to the doctor as often for check-ins. And so, you know, the hospital also is going to suffer. I can just kind of have just how the system works. And by impact on rural areas for the cuts, negative $155 billion over 10 years. So Roger said the ad that he was fighting for funding for rural health care, but the bill that he voted for that is like the top bill that the president brags about for the first two years' cut funding for rural areas by $155 billion. Kansas is really getting hit about as hard as anybody over these cuts. According to an article in the beacon from earlier this year, Kansas leads the nation with

10:23almost 30 rural hospitals at immediate risk of closure and nearly 70 facing severe financial danger. So what you're going to end up with here is obvious. I have more rural hospitals shutting down in Kansas farther. People are going to have to go further to get various treatments, especially as specialized treatments. And what they're probably going to end up getting stuck doing is, you know, having to go to somebody like Dr. Roger Marshall. And hopefully the doctors that are working in Kansas still actively will tend to their patients without agitating that they be jailed if they can't pay right away. So that is basically kind of a sum up of where he is on the core health care system. What about kind of some of the Mahas stuff you might wonder? I'm surprised that he's fully jumped on board with RFK. He hasn't even done kind of the build Cassidy thing where I'm a doctor and I get to dance around a little bit.

11:23And I have some concerns about RFK. No concerns about RFK for Roger Marshall. He was full steam ahead on confirming RFK. Now we have this huge spike in measles happening around the country. Measles killing people in Pennsylvania. And earlier this year Marshall was asked about his view on the COVID vaccine. Let's watch that. I mean, who didn't have a friend that took this vaccine and had some type of complication? A stroke, a blood clot, a young man getting some type of heart inflammation as well. That's what destroyed the trust in the American people for our government. I think I don't know if that's a rhetorical question, but I guess me. I didn't know anyone that took the vaccine and had a stroke as a complication. The vaccine saved millions of lives throughout the world. Obviously this was, I know this was funny, I know this was Trump. And it was Operation Warp Street, maybe the one good thing he did. And the stuff is happening fast. And I do think that some of the claims about the vaccine and whether you're still contagious, etc.

12:29After you got the vaccine, you know, some of the initial claims were overstated. And like anything, you know, there's some side effects when you've watched any pharmaceutical commercial. For the most part, what you see is people that got the vaccine once vaccine came online, death rates plummet, and communities where people didn't take the vaccine, death rates continued to rise. So that's just what happened. Like more people died who didn't get the vaccine because the COVID vaccine, the RNA vaccine saved lives. And it's like a doctor, I should be able to understand that calculation. And what he's doing here, by continuing to create doubt about this vaccine and this miracle technology, really, is giving you support to the guy confirmed for HHS RFK who wants to shut down, you know, additional research funding,

13:29and additional use of mRNA vaccines. And like the advancements there could be unbelievable. I'm seeing some really potentially amazing advancements. Like we could be in a real renaissance here for science. That's like the whole this whole thing is so like darkly ironic that like Trump, you know, could've done thinking that did his whole life, which is like take credit for something he didn't do. And he could have come in right now under this Maha banner and under, you know, and harcuing back to operation warp speed and kind of using all these technological advances that we're seeing right now. And like taking credit for a lot of new cures that are going to be coming online, but instead they're, you know, trying to take us back to the stone ages where people don't get treatment. And if you have to get emergency treatment and you can't pay, you go to jail.

14:31That's that's a vision that Roger Marshall has for our health care for the health care people and Kansas. Speaking of jail, he also wants Fauci to go to jail. Maybe we should just watch that for kicks, but Fauci's going to take the fifth. That's probably what he'll do because he should go to jail and we should certainly we should be stopping all of his government pensions as well. He gets very excited about sending other people to jail like that's something that he's really keen on. And Dr. Fauci is on the list, the woman that he gave a C section to that owed him a couple hundred bucks. Also on the list. What else do you have for Roger Marshall here? It's not just these positions on health care and vaccines. It's across the board. He is just basically a okay with with policies being put in place by the Trump administration that are hurting candidates, whether that be cuts to oral health care or tariff policies that are increasing costs or supporting the Iran war, which is also increasing costs across the board.

15:35Roger Marshall has been cheerleading all of them. Let's let's look to the Iran war first. Roger Marshall doesn't seem to care that much that energy costs are going up for as much as fellow canton's but again, he lives in Florida now, but for for cancer to stay the T supposedly represents. How long do you think Americans will be willing to pay the higher energy costs while we are confronting Iran? I mean, obviously we know why we're paying it, but how long do you think we're going to be willing to keep paying it? That's an interesting question. I think back to my grandparents and their generation that served in World War II. Could you imagine trying to tell the president, look, you only got so many days to defeat Hitler or defeat Japan? Yeah, almost just that one. A couple other times he said this. We don't know when the war is going to be over. We don't know when the sanctions should go back on. We're asking you about gas prices that Americans are paying that are extremely high and having wild swings. In part because of the war with Iran that the president started.

16:38So again, freedom is not free. Americans are going to have to make some sacrifices, but we're operating from a point of string. So there you go. I don't know if Marshall could not be clear about this. Freedom isn't free. Since Americans got to make sacrifices. If it costs more money to fill the tank, it doesn't matter. It was absolutely critical that we take out the IOTOLA because it was such a danger. So he doesn't care about your economic suffering. And he doesn't really care if there's any time on your economic suffering. He could go on forever. Donald Trump said earlier this week that he now thinks the war is going to go on at least past the election. So through the midterms, higher costs were seen, the highest gas prices we've seen since like the very first pop right after the war started. Roger Marshall is fully on board with that. He's a little bit of a confusing kind of combination of views though. Because simultaneously, Roger Marshall thinks that it was super important that we start a war of choice with Iran in order to safeguard America because Iran was such a threat.

17:44Like we had to do this because Iran was such a threat. And so if that means that you're paying more in gas, you're paying more in fertilizer, that's okay. We have to do that because of the threat to Iran. So on the one hand, he thinks that on the other hand, he also thinks that we should just go ahead and let Iran have some missiles out of fairness. Let's take a look at that take. Senator, are you okay with the Ron having missiles? You know what I'm hesitating? I prefer that they not. I certainly don't want them have long distance missiles. I don't want them to have nuclear-armed missiles. I would prefer they didn't. I don't think that's the key issue here. I think that they have to be able to defend themselves. And I just kind of come back to the big picture here is that the Middle East countries like this agreement. You think Iran needs to be able to defend itself? I do. I think that they have to be able to defend themselves. Otherwise, we turn this into a forever war. You're never going to get them a sort of boots on the ground of surrendering everything, an unconditional agreement if you will.

18:44So big threat, Iran is a huge threat as such. We had to start this war of choice. Also too, we should just let them have missiles. It's cool for them to have missiles. It's a combination of usually don't see a lot out there. So you do have to give him credit for uniqueness on the tariffs front fully on board with Trump's tariffs. These are harming the Kansas economy as much as anywhere in the country. Obviously, agriculture is a cornerstone of the economy in 2024 over 4.7 billion and exports for agricultural goods. So we have a trade war that we have with China, with Canada, is impacting these exports. These markets aren't as interested in our goods. They don't make economic sense anymore. The globalized trade market has been disrupted to such a degree that it's a lose lose for a canton. So the producers, the farmers are struggling. Farm bankruptcies are up.

19:45The consumers are struggling because we have to raise costs on these inputs as we were mentioning on fertilizer gas prices going up, effects, food prices going up because you're not there getting driven around the state on trucks and look at the diesel price right now. It is a trickle down that impacts everything. So Roger Marshall, let's sum this up. Four rural health care cuts voted for it supports the tariffs enthusiastically that are making everything more expensive for farmers and consumers in Kansas supports the stupid war that is driving up gas prices. And really he kind of wags the finger at you if you aren't supportive of that shame on you. What would your grandparents think of you? Like what? How is this representing Kansas? Like why do you think he supports all these policies? The answer is that he just does whatever Mr. Trump wants. When it comes to the Trump bootleakers, there are a lot of other people who get more attention because they're a little bit more famous.

20:46Ted Cruz, RIP Lindsey Graham, these types of people get more attention. But Roger Marshall, is at the front of the class when it comes to sucking up to Donald Trump. Let's watch. Well, I think this is once again President Trump negotiating. That's all this is all this is about using that position as leverage to get a save actor, get a few other things he wants to. You should everyone should go read his art of the deal book. If you did, if you haven't yet, I made my entire staff read it as a freshman member of Congress and I refer back to it all the time. It tells you who Trump was in his raw state. And I think he's just negotiating. I don't like hearing about Trump in a raw state at all. So that's a phrase that I wish Roger Marshall had not inserted into the public dialogue. But yeah, he made everybody on the staff read out of the deal. Guys, if we go and suck up to Trump, we have to be able to reference the book that someone else goes for him. Okay, so everybody needs to read it on the staff.

21:52And he also continues, and he says this is in 2017, but all the way to today, like Roger Marshall is standing side by side of Trump, not making any case that that we should change course at all. He thinks things are going great. Let's watch the system of where things are on the economy. So he'll be here, counting manufacturing jobs, the Trump agenda that is actually working. I'm telling you that the economy here in Kansas is really set to go forward this year. So there you go. The economy here in Kansas here. It's really set. That's not great. Everything is great. As we've covered a bunch of some other horrible Republicans, he is, of course, an election denier. His very first vote in the Senate was to object to the election certification. He said that vote was from his heart. The same dark heart that supports debtors' prisons for medical debt. He, of course, was himself elected on that same ballot and didn't seem to have any issues with that.

22:52He voted against creating independent commission on January 6th. And, you know, on abortion, I know this should be surprising, but it's interesting. Kansas, as you look at this race, in 2022, there was an abortion restriction ballot measure in Kansas. And it was rejected overwhelmingly. And so I do think some of the people's perceptions of the politics of Kansas are wrong. 2022, that's not a great midterm for the Democrats. That's the Biden midterm. You didn't get the full red wave Republicans, what a majority nationally, certainly had a majority in Kansas. And yet the Kansas electorate voted against that abortion restriction ballot. Well, Marshall was fully for it. So there you go. So there's a lot of people who are fully fully in support of the rejected Kansas abortion restriction ballot all in an election denial. Big fan of medical debtors' prisons, cutting Medicaid, pro tariffs, pro-stupid Iran war, thinks the economy's going great.

23:57So he's running Kansas against Pastra Adam Hamilton. I hope that folks really can get a full look at what he's got to offer. And we'll see we'll see other things shake out. We'll see other things shake out for him. And maybe at the end, who knows, we can let him have a few missiles. That is it. We're going to have more every week. We bring in yet another crazy Republican. If you've got a friend in Kansas, share this with him. Or if they're not in Kansas, just for kicks, you can share it with him. We appreciate all you guys. We'll be seeing you here soon.