One more thing about that Kansas Senate campaign ad...

 

I don’t write about specific political campaign ads very often, but this one happens to be directly related to the healthcare field (namely, medical debt), so it seemed to merit a few words.

About a week ago, Adam Hamilton, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Kansas, came out with a new TV ad featuring one of the former patients who was once sued by his Republican opponent, incumbent Senator (and former OB/GYN) Roger Marshall (the ad starts at 2:26 in the clip posted above).

In the ad, the woman, Meischa Zimmerman, says:

“One evening I see lights. I open the door, and it’s a police officer. They arrested me because I didn’t make a $50 payment to Roger Marshall. I was 8 months pregnant and I said please, do not handcuff me in front of my 2-yr old daughter.

“Roger Marshall preyed on the low-income families of Kansas. The healthcare system is broken…but not for Roger Marshall. He’s absolutely profiting from it.”

In response to this ad, a few days later, Sen. Marshall claimed that the ad was “defamatory,” demanded that the Hamilton campaign cease & desist running it, and threatened legal action:

Lawyers for a Kansas Republican U.S. senator running for reelection sent his opponent a cease-and-desist letter demanding the Democrat stop airing an ad featuring one of the senator’s former patients.

The lawyers for U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, said in a Monday letter that the Rev. Adam Hamilton’s campaign had published and distributed ads about Marshall’s medical debt collection practices that were “defamatory.”

The ad begins with Meischa Zimmerman, who said she was arrested while eight months pregnant for missing a $50 payment to Marshall. She was paying roughly $50 a month to account for 18% interest on nearly $3,600 in total debt, according to court records.

The woman was one of more than 700 patients who Marshall sued while a practicing physician in Great Bend, according to reporting by the New York Times.

In response to that, today the Hamilton campaign’s attorneys responded to Marshall’s demands, going through the claims, the facts, the ad and the law point by point.

A bunch of other outlets have been writing about this story, so I’ll try not to be redundant…but there’s one factor which I haven’t seen anyone else mention which I feel needs some attention, and it’s this:

“…She was paying roughly $50 a month to account for 18% interest on nearly $3,600 in total debt, according to court records.”

18% interest sounds pretty excessive to me, so out of curiosity I decided to plug that into a debt calculator to see just how long it would take to pay off $3,600 at $50/month.

At 0% interest, of course, it would take exactly 6 years, since you’re just paying off the principal. The child who Marshall delivered for Ms. Zimmerman via c-section (ie, the procedure which incurred the debt to begin with) would be in the first grade before it was paid off.

• At 1% interest it would take 75 months.

• At 5% it would take 86 months, or over 7 years.

• At 10% it would take 111 months, or over 9 years.

• At 12% interest it would take 128 months.

• At 15% interest it would take 15 1/2 years. Her kid would be in driver’s ed.

• At 16% interest it would take 244 months…or over 20 years. The child whose birth initiated the $3,600 debt in the first place would be nearly old enough to drive.

• At 16.66% interest, it would take 568 monthly payments of $50 apiece to pay off…or more than 47 years. Ms. Zimmerman would presumably be on Medicare at this point, and her child would be a middle-aged man.

Why did I go with such a specific percent for this last example?

Because at anything above 16.66% interest, I get the following error message:

Your payments are not enough to cover the accumulated interest. Try increasing the payments.

That’s right: At 18% interest, the rate Marshall was charging this woman, there was literally no way she could possibly have paid off a $3,600 bill at $50/month.

It wouldn’t matter if she never missed a payment—the interest in the first month alone would have been more than $50, meaning the balance would grow higher every month…for eternity.

 

If you’re not great at math, I’ll explain why this is:

• $3,600 x 18% = $648/year
• $648 / 12 = $54/month in interest

In other words, paying anything less than $54.01 per month means that the interest would be racking up faster than the payments…which is clearly what was happening here, since according to the NY Times article, “it had ballooned to over $7,000 with interest” several years ago.

Try it for yourself here.

I'll leave it at that.