The poor ‘just don’t want health care,’ Republican claims
Congressman, ex-doctor under fire as GOP push Obamacare replacement
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 a 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 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.
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.”
Marshall is not the only House member who’s had to clarify his comments about health care and the poor.
“Americans have choices, and they’ve got to make a choice,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz said on CNN Tuesday morning. “And so maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care.”
A new health-care bill unveiled by Republicans as a replacement for Obamacare is now making its way through Congress.
The American Health Care Act replaces federal insurance subsidies with individual tax credits and grants to help states shape their own policies. It also preserves two of the most popular features of the ACA: allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26 and forbidding insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.