Roger Marshall faces more heat over medical debt collection

There's a new ad in the Kansas Senate race, and it wants you to believe Roger Marshall is some kind of medical debt villain. Adam Hamilton, the Democratic nominee and a pastor, is going after the senator for allegedly cracking down on patients who owed him small amounts of money during his years as a doctor. Let's get this straight. Marshall ran a private practice. Private practices have overhead, staff to pay, and bills of their own. Collecting what patients owe is not a scandal. It's called staying in business.

The ad's framing is deliberately misleading. Hamilton's campaign is digging through old court filings, presumably to find any story that makes a doctor look greedy. This is the same playbook Democrats run everywhere: turn a hardworking physician into a cartoon villain. But Kansas voters know better. They understand that a small medical practice isn't a charity, and that unpaid debts are a real problem. Most doctors forgive what they can and work with patients on payment plans. That's not the story Hamilton wants to tell, so he's looking for the worst anecdote he can find.

The pastor is attacking the pro-life doctor for expecting to be paid. That's the whole ad. And it's telling that Hamilton has nothing better to offer than a malpractice-adjacent smear from decades ago. Meanwhile, Marshall is focused on border security, inflation, and pushing back on the left's healthcare power grabs. His opponent wants to turn this race into a referendum on who can score the most cheap political points. That might work in a vacuum, but not in a state that sent Trump by a wide margin twice.

If this is Hamilton's closing argument, it's a weak one. Kansans are tired of being lied to about their own neighbors. Roger Marshall delivered babies, treated patients, and then went to Washington to fight for them. The people attacking him are the ones trying to nationalize healthcare and tell you they know better than the doctor who actually did the work. Let Adams explain to a farmer in western Kansas why a pediatrician collecting a $50 copay is a menace. We have a feeling that conversation won't end well for him.