President Donald Trump falsely claimed – in a speech that drew outrage over an antisemitic trope – that Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) was legally required to sue patients over unpaid medical bills, according to a new fact check from CNN's Daniel Dale.
Marshall, an OB-GYN locked in a competitive re-election race, has been under fire since a New York Times report found that he filed hundreds of lawsuits against patients and charged them 18 percent annual interest, and dozens of those patients were arrested after missing court dates in collections cases.
“He was given a bum rap because he was mandated by law to request, strongly, money owed from patients,” Trump said in Park City. “You have to, by law, go after those people, and they made it like, oh, he was some kind of a Shylock-type guy.”
His antisemitic comment prompted widespread criticism, but Trump went on to claim that Marshall “would have been breaking a very strong criminal law” and faced “criminal arrest” if he hadn’t gone after patients.
That’s false, according to Dale's analysis. State and federal laws give doctors broad leeway to forgive debts or use gentler collection methods, and Marshall himself told CNN last week that his practice “wrote off hundreds of people’s bills every month.”
No law requires 18 percent interest, either. The Kansas City Star found that rate was unusually high even among Kansas practices that sued patients.
The White House pointed to two federal laws requiring providers to make reasonable efforts to collect from patients in federal programs, but it left out that those same rules let doctors forgive bills for patients who can’t pay. One of the articles the White House sent as evidence said so explicitly.
The federal health inspector general’s guidance says doctors are “free to waive a copayment if you make an individual determination that the patient cannot afford to pay.” Lawsuits are not among the required collection steps.
“I’ve never heard of a doctor going to jail for failure to collect money owed by patients,” said Christopher Garmon, a health administration professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Marshall’s campaign didn’t respond to CNN’s repeated requests to name the law in question.
Tyson Brody, a spokesperson for Marshall’s Democratic opponent, Adam Hamilton, was blunt.
“Roger Marshall chose to sue his patients,” Brody said. “These were not normal business practices – they were extreme and predatory.”