From thestar.com
WASHINGTON—A first-term congressman who spent three decades as a physician — and is now part of a group of Republican doctors who have a major role in replacing Obamacare — is facing backlash after saying that poor people “just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.”
Republican Rep. Roger Marshall, a member of the Republican Doctors Caucus, said comments he made to Stat News were not meant to suggest that poor people take health care for granted. The comments were published in a story last week about his burgeoning role in the fight to replace the Affordable Care Act.
“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’” Marshall said in response to a question about Medicaid, which expanded under Obamacare to more than 30 states. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.”
He added that “morally, spiritually, socially,” the poor, including the homeless, “just don’t want health care.”
“The Medicaid population, which is 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,” he told Stat News, a website focused on health care coverage. “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 the ER.”
The comments immediately drew criticism from Medicaid advocates in Kansas, with some saying that Marshall mischaracterized and misunderstood people who are on the program.
“These are people who are out there, working hard, paying their bills, and to have their elected member of Congress pointing their finger at them I’m sure is disappointing,” David Jordan, executive director of the Alliance for a Healthy Kansas, told the Kansas City Star.
In response to the backlash, Marshall, who was elected in November, said he was trying to explain that a national health care policy around “one segment of the population” does not work because groups of people have varying medical needs and use different health care resources.
“I was also saying that Obamacare has increased premiums on working, middle-class families by almost 200 per cent in some places, and with deductibles of over $10,000, many don’t actually have access to health care,” Marshall said in a statement. “Coverage means nothing if you can’t afford access.”
He added: “When I said, ‘the poor will always be with us,’ it was actually in the context of supporting the obligation we have to always take care of people, but we cannot completely craft a larger, affordable health care policy around a comparatively small segment of the population who will get care no matter what.”
He also brought up his years in the medical field. Before he was elected, Marshall was an OB/GYN in Great Bend, Kan., helping to deliver more than 5,000 babies throughout his career, according to a brief biography.
Read more here