Bulwark Takes - GOP Senator Had His Patients ARRESTED Over Medical Bills

Episode Date: September 12, 2026

Tim Miller takes a closer look at Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, whose record as a doctor is under new scrutiny after a New York Times investigation found that he sued more than 700 patients over medical debt, with 81 ultimately arrested after missing court dates. Plus: Marshall’s views on healthcare and vaccines, his support for Trump’s Iran war and tariffs, and his record of going along with the president even as Kansans face higher costs.Related Links:The New York Times: “A Doctor Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He’s a Senator.”https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/us/politics/roger-marshall-obgyn-doctor-debts.htmlSTAT: “Two months ago, this doctor was delivering babies. Now he’s at the nexus of the Obamacare fight”https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/03/roger-marshall-kansas-obamacare/The Kansas City Star: “Roger Marshall calls Kansas cabin home. Official trips took him near $1.2M Florida house”https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article292974104.htmlThe Beacon: “Why 30 hospitals in Kansas and 12 in Missouri are at risk of closure”https://thebeaconnews.org/stories/2026/01/08/why-30-rural-hospitals-in-kansas-and-12-in-missouri-are-at-risk/The Bulwark: Sam Stein and Tim Miller interview Adam Hamiltonhttps://www.thebulwark.com/p/sam-stein-and-adam-hamilton-trumpsWatch more in Tim's series about the worst Republicans running in the 2026 midterm: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdXT8ySfDKu0

Hey, everybody. It's Tim Miller from The Bullwork. 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, you know, 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 as a 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 1-23 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.

Stacey Garrity, election denier extraordinaire, running against Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs, literally organized the insurrection running, and 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, recovered of Arizona. So that's a competitive crew, all right? 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. He is the 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 interviews can be a little stilted. This interview, I thought was great.

So we'll put a link to the show notes there, and you can go watch it if you missed it. Why I picked Roger Marshall for this week's edition is there was 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. I 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's 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 debtor's prison,

which I thought it was something that we'd move past as a society, but not the sender 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 looking at this. I was just like, how is that, like, how does that even possible? Who are the 81?

was he doing medical care for drug treatments and the people are getting arrested for unrelated issues? No, they went and interviewed these people and they were arrested because they had bench warrants because Marshall was suing them and they were unable to pay their fine or didn't show up to court. So it was a literal debtor's prison for medical debt. And Roger Marshall was agitating for that for his fellow Kansans. He had 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. 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 poll. up to Joe Vasquez's home in Earl Kansas. Marshall had fired a lawsuit against him and his wife over unpaid $4,561 bill from her emergency hysterectomy. Three years earlier, they'd missed a court date and the doctor's lawyer asked the court to 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 a bond. Mr. Vasquez said we had no. money to pay at the time his wife was working at a manufacturing plant and he was on disability. That's kind of the vision 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 bucks from a postpartum visit.

her baby was nine months old at the time she offered a payment plan for the hundred twenty nine bucks Marshall's lawyer demanded full payment another woman was arrested three times over a C-section bill that's just like you know it's just such a commitment to life you know you've got to really respect the pro-life doctor who's so committed to life that he wants a young mother of two young kids jailed because she wasn't fully able to pay her C-section bill that's the vision for the country he has and the vision for health care that he has

If you're wondering, okay, you know, maybe Rogers, kind of a rural doctor that was struggling in his own right. And he really needed his 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, he sold his house in Kansas. Nice house, five-bedroom, four bath. And instead, he's living in Sarasota, Florida in a much larger and more expensive house, includes a boat dock. So he's out there on his boat in Florida.

as a senator from Kansas. And, you know, back in Kansas are people that had been jailed because they couldn't afford the $129 bill for their postpartum doctor visit. It's kind of guy Roger Marshall is in case you wonder, okay, you know, maybe the details of this are complicated. I mean, there's something that the New York Times isn't telling us, that Tim isn't telling us. Roger Marshall was pretty upfront about his views about how, you know,

whether people deserve health care, whether everybody should get health care. whether affordable 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 peek 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.

us throw up your hands so we should do nothing about it. It's been a minute since I read the New Testament. 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' teachings to know that that caring for the poor, tending to the poor, tending for the sick was kind of a core tenant there. You know, the notion was not just that, like, there will always be poor, so 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 really kind of the main thrust of Jesus' teaching. Luckily for Roger, he is running against a pastor. So I 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 pay it a little bit more.

And I think he's a little bit unhappy that sick patients with emergency hysterectomys aren't paying enough. And so I think that would be a fix that he's looking to. How can we 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, kind of reposition.

I think maybe they've seen some stuff in the polling that this isn't that popular that position, like a debtor's prison for medical. care. Isn't that popular? And so he's a new ad. Let's just take a quick one. I'm Dr. Roger Marshall, and I approve this message. Every day, Dr. Roger Marshall's 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. A workhorse for Kansas. That's Dr. Roger Marshall. But Adam Hamilton, the woke

megachurch CEO, a stalking horse for Schumer. And big city liberals who hate our way of life. Too 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 finding to do the opposite.

You could really call that a lie. The health care funding for rural Kansas that he fought for was the one big beautiful bill. In that bill, there were cuts to make. Medicaid and the ACA marketplaces result in coverage losses for rural Americans disproportionately. As a result, that then puts strain on rural health care facilities, right? If people in 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.

It's kind of just how the system works. combined 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 from 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 almost 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 specialized treatments and what they'll probably 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 maha stuff you might wonder well i don't think you'll be surprised that he's fully jumped on board with RFK. He hasn't even done kind of the Bill Cassidy thing where I'm a doctor and I've got to dance around a little bit and 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 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 again, the funniest thing about this is that this was Trump. And it was Operation Warp Speed, maybe the one good thing he did. And this stuff is happening fast. And I do think that some of like the claims about the vaccine and, you know, whether you're still contagious, et cetera, after 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 in 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 saves lives. And it's like, a doctor 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 he's giving aid support to the guy confirmed for HHS, RFK, who wants to shut down additional research funding and additional use of MRNA vaccines. And the advancements there could be unbelievable.

I mean, we're seeing some really potentially amazing advancements. Like, we could be in a real renaissance here for science. This whole thing is so darkly ironic that, like, Trump, you know, could have done the thing he 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, harkering 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 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. That's a vision that Roger Marshall has. for our health care, for the health care people in 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 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 we have for Roger Marshall here? Well, it's not just these positions on health care and vaccines. It's across the board. He is just basically a-okay with policies being put in place by the Trump administration that are hurting Kansas, whether that be cuts to rural health care or tariff policies that are increasing costs or supporting the Iran War, which is also increasing

across the board, Roger Marshall has been cheerleading all of them. Let's look to the Iran war first. Roger Marshall doesn't seem to care that much that energy costs are going up for, I was about to say his fellow Canton's, but again, he lives in Florida now, but for Kansas, it's a state that he 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? You know, that's an interesting question. I think back to my grandparents and their generation that served in World War II.

Could you imagine, you know, trying to tell the president, look, you only got so many days to defeat Hitler or defeat Japan. Yeah, it wasn't 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. I'm 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.

Right. So, again, freedom is not free. Americans are going to have to make some sacrifices, but we're operating from a point of strength. So there you go. Iinadja Marshall could not be clear about this. Freedom isn't free. Canton's Americans got to make sacrifices. If it costs more money to help the tank, it doesn't matter. It was absolutely critical that we take out the Ayatollah 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 limit on your economic suffering. So it 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, we're seeing the highest gas prices we've seen since like the very first pop right after the war started. And Roger Marshall's 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.

Like 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 Iran having missiles?

You know, I'm hesitating. I prefer that they not. I certainly don't want them to have long-distance missiles. I don't want them to have nuclear-armed missiles. I would prefer they didn't. But 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 it somehow? 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 short of boots on the ground of surrendering everything, an unconditional agreement, if you will. So 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 cool for them to have missiles. It's a combination of views you don't see a lot out there. So you do have to give him credit for uniqueness. the tariffs front fully on board of 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 in exports for agricultural goods. The 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 Kansans that the producers, the farmers, are struggling. Farm bankruptcies are up. And also the consumers are struggling because we have to raise costs on these inputs,

as we've been mentioning, unfertilized gas prices going up affects food prices going up because they're getting driven around. the state on trucks and, you know, 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. They're 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? How is this representing Kansas? 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 bootlickers, there are a lot of other people who get more attention because they're a little bit more famous. You know, Ted Cruz, R. IP, Lindsey Graham, these types of people get more attention. But Roger Marshall is at the front of the class when it comes to second 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. He's using that position as leverage to get a save actor, get a few other things he wants to. He, you should, everyone should go read his Art of the Deal book if you didn't, 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 shows 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're going to suck up to Trump, we have to be able to reference the book. Someone else ghost wrote for him. Okay. So everybody needs to read it on the staff. And 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 we should change course at all. He thinks things are going great.

Let's watch his assessment of where things are on the economy. So he'll be your touting manufacturing jobs, the Trump agenda that it's actually working. Marie, 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 of these 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, didn't seem to have any issues with that. He voted against creating an independent commission on January 6th. And, you know, on abortion, I don't think 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 sometimes people's perceptions of the politics of Kansas are wrong. long. 2022, that's not a great midterm for the Democrats. That's the Biden midterm.

You didn't get the full red wave. Republicans were a majority nationally. Certainly had a majority in Kansas. And yet the Kansas elector voted against that abortion restriction ballot. Well, Marshall was fully for it. So there you go. Fully in support of the rejected Kansas abortion restriction ballot. All in on election denial.

Now, big fan of medical debtors prisons, cutting Medicaid, pro-tariffs, pro-stupid Iran war, thinks the economy's going great. That's your guy, Roger Marshall. He's running Kansas against Pastor Adam Hamilton. I hope that folks really can get a full look at what he's got to offer. We'll see how things shake out. We'll see how things shake out for him. And maybe at the end, who knows, we can look. let him have a few missiles. All right, that is it. We're going to have more. Every week we're

bringing you another crazy Republican. If you've got a friend in Kansas, share this with them. Or if they're not in Kansas, just for kicks, you can share it with them. We appreciate all you guys. We'll be seeing you here soon.