Dr. Roger Marshall, Kansas Congressional District 1, has been pretty frank in his assessment of Obamacare: he’s opposed. He talks about his work being a hospital administrator, at the physician owned Great Bend Regional facility. And while he conveniently leaves out discussing the fact that his for-profit hospital ended up driving the non-for-profit Catholic Hospital out of business in 2011, Marshall couldn’t always avoid the concerns of Kansas hospitals, not in light of the closure of Mercy Hospital last year.
In an interview with STAT, however, Marshall offers his unique assessment as to why ACA was never going to work: because poor people don’t want insurance.
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“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’” he said. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.”
Pressed on that point, Marshall shrugged.
“Just, like, homeless people. … I think just morally, spiritually, socially, [some people] just don’t want health care,” he said. “The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card, as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging, I’m just saying socially that’s where they are. So there’s a group of people that even with unlimited access to health care are only going to use the emergency room when their arm is chopped off or when their pneumonia is so bad they get brought [into] the ER.”
Marshall, who argues that it is either a moral failing or just the way people are, provides a unique perspective from a doctor — that maybe people just don’t deserve access to health care, because, you know, if they had it, they wouldn’t use it.
Marshall, a practitioner in Great Bend, was promoted by many as the “moderate” Republican in the race, despite his bitterly anti-choice and anti-progressive issue stances.
Rep. Marshall, however, may have just said out loud what most Republicans say only in private: poor people don’t deserve insurance. Because, you know, they don’t know how to use it.