Ad for US Senate Seat in Kansas Pillories Roger Marshall for Having Pregnant Mom Arrested Over $50 Medical Payment

The campaign of Kansas Democratic US Senate candidate Adam Hamilton on Friday released an ad highlighting incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall's history of having patients arrested for medical debt.

The ad features Meischa Zimmerman, a one-time patient of Marshall, who prior to running for political office had a long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist.

Zimmerman begins the ad by recounting her 2011 arrest.

"One evening, I see [police] lights, I open the door, and it's a police officer," Zimmerman explains. "They arrested me because I didn't make a $50 payment to Roger Marshall."

"I was eight months pregnant," she continues. "And I said, 'Please do not handcuff me in front of my two-year-old daughter.'"

At the end of the ad, Zimmerman turns Marshall's aggressive debt collection tactics into an indictment of the for-profit US healthcare system.

"Roger Marshall preyed on the low-income families of Kansas," she says. "The healthcare system is broken, but not for Roger Marshall. He's absolutely profiting from it."

Zimmerman's story was highlighted earlier this month in a report from The New York Times, which found that Marshall filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients for medical debt, leading to at least 81 of them getting arrested.

Zimmerman owed Marshall $3,596 for a C-section her performed while delivering one of her children and, after his office sued her for outstanding medical debt, she agreed to undertake a monthly $50 payment plan.

Zimmerman told the Times that, while she tried to make the monthly payments, there were times when she couldn't keep up.

"I had to choose whether I’d pay my electricity," Zimmerman said, "or pay $50 to a doctor who didn’t need it."

Additionally, the law firm representing Marshall began charging 18% interest on her unpaid bill, which she said nearly doubled the total value she owed.

The Times story found that many patients Marshall sued didn't have anywhere close to the thousands of dollars in medical debt owed by Zimmerman, and that one of his patients was arrested for owing as little as $114.

The anti-Marshall ad drew praise from many political observers, who described it as a searing indictment of the Kansas Republican's character.

"This is a killer ad," wrote Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, in a social media post. "If Hamilton defeats Marshall for Senate in Kansas, include it in your analysis."

Bloomberg columnist Francis Wilkerson similarly described the ad as "among the best... I've seen."

Amanda Litman, president of Run for Something, declared after watching the ad that "Roger Marshall is a real piece of shit."

James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, argued that the ad was so strong that it could break through a key barrier progressives have long faced when challenging right-wing politicians.

"One of the structural advantages that Republicans have enjoyed the last 10 to 15 years is ordinary people didn't believe you when you told them how evil they were," Goodwin wrote. "After all, how could anyone be that evil? That's just the left exaggerating again, right? It feels like that is starting to fall apart."