Sen. Roger Marshall is calling a New York Times investigation into his former OB-GYN practice a politically motivated "hit job" bankrolled by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, but his Democratic opponent says the senator's own lawyer confirms the damaging details.
Marshall, a Kansas Republican running for a second term, sat down with Fox News Digital at the Republican National Committee's midterm convention in Dallas to respond to the September 8 Times report. The investigation alleged that Marshall and his lawyers filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients over unpaid medical bills at his former practice, Heartland Regional OB-GYN, and that 81 of those patients were arrested after missing court dates.
Marshall did not hold back. He compared the Times piece to tabloid journalism and pointed the finger directly at the Senate's top Democrat.
"I think that Kansans look at a story like this and realize it's from something like the National Enquirer, that this is totally a hit job by left media, an article paid for by Chuck Schumer."
He offered no documentary evidence for the claim that Schumer funded or directed the report. But the accusation fits a pattern: Marshall framed the entire story as an election-season operation designed to soften a ruby-red state that national Democrats badly want to flip.
The senator described a straightforward billing process. Patients who fell behind on payments were given months, nine months to a year, by his account, before their bills were turned over to a third-party collection agency. After that handoff, Marshall said, he played no role in what happened next.
"I would never want anyone to be arrested because of money that they owe myself or the hospital. But we had standard policies. Once they went to collections, I was never asked another, had nothing else to do with the process. These were professional companies that did the collection processes."
He described a lenient threshold for patients willing to communicate. His standing instruction to his office manager, he said, was simple: if a patient paid even five dollars a month and stayed in contact, the office left them alone. Only a "very small, small, small fraction" of unpaid bills ever reached collections at all, he said.
Marshall also emphasized the context of his practice. He was, by his telling, the only OB-GYN serving a population of roughly 60,000 people, on call every night for close to 30 years. He was a founding partner of Great Bend Regional Hospital and one of the few doctors in the area who accepted Medicaid. Many bills, he said, were simply written off.
Schumer, for his part, has faced his own share of public confrontations and controversy in recent months. Marshall's allegation that the minority leader orchestrated the Times report adds another layer to an already contentious relationship between the two parties' Senate leadership.
Adam Hamilton, the Democratic Senate nominee and megachurch pastor who led what has been described as the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, announced his campaign on April 30, 2026, in Prairie Village, Kansas. His campaign wasted no time using the Times report as ammunition.
Tyson Brody, Hamilton's campaign spokesperson, pushed back hard on Marshall's characterization that collections were handled independently. Brody cited Marshall's own attorney in making two pointed claims: that Marshall personally requested an 18 percent annual interest rate on patient debts, which Brody called "50% higher than the statutory rate in Kansas", and that Marshall allowed his lawyer to seek warrants, arrests, and garnishments against new and expecting mothers.
"Senator Marshall should explain why he sued a woman who claimed he was charging her for his own mistakes, and why he had patients jailed for as little as $115."
Brody also relayed accounts from patients described in the Times investigation. One woman said she had requested a payment plan but was pressed to pay in full. Another reported being arrested while struggling with payments.
The tension between Marshall's account and his opponent's claims creates an unresolved question at the center of the story. Marshall says he handed bills to a collection agency and walked away. His opponent's campaign says Marshall's own lawyer confirms the senator set the terms, the interest rate, the legal tools available, before that handoff. Both versions cannot be fully true. The Fox News Digital report does not resolve which characterization is more accurate, and Marshall told the outlet he had not even read the Times article.
Vice President JD Vance stumped for Marshall at a campaign event shortly before the controversy erupted. Vance, described as one of the Trump administration's most valuable surrogates on the campaign trail this cycle, praised Marshall as a loyal ally to President Trump who has "stood up for everyday Americans every single day he's been in the United States Senate."
The event did not go without disruption. A protester interrupted Vance's remarks and referenced the Times report directly. Vance dismissed the interruption and defended Marshall on the spot.
"Now, this guy, this guy, I'm telling you, ladies and gentlemen, here's what happened is he decided to come in and lie about my very dear friend Doc Marshall, because the reality is that Doc Marshall has stood up for everyday Americans every single day he's been in the United States Senate."
The vice president's willingness to personally campaign in Kansas underscores what both parties see: a race that is tightening in a state long favored to stay in Republican hands. Schumer's political operation has been aggressive but not always successful in recent legislative fights, and flipping a Kansas Senate seat would represent a significant strategic prize for Democrats heading into the midterms.
One of the more striking moments in Marshall's interview came when he explained his refusal to engage with the Times article directly.
"Look, I'm not even gonna give The New York Times the honor of me reading their article. But I just think that I trust our judges a lot more than what they're describing there. Our judges wouldn't do what they're describing in that article. There had to be something else going on."
That statement raises its own questions. Marshall is simultaneously dismissing the report as fabricated and suggesting that if arrests did occur, there must have been additional circumstances the Times failed to capture. He cannot easily hold both positions, that the story is fiction and that the facts have a reasonable explanation, without reading the report he says he will not read.
The broader political dynamics are familiar. Senate Democrats have invested heavily in challenging Republican incumbents in traditionally safe states, and Schumer's political standing depends in part on expanding the map. Marshall's allegation that the minority leader planted an investigative story in the nation's most prominent newspaper is a serious charge, one that, if true, would represent a troubling weaponization of media access. But Marshall offered no evidence beyond the timing and the political convenience of the report.
Several key facts remain unresolved. The Fox News Digital report does not specify which third-party collection agencies Marshall's practice used, does not identify the specific Kansas statutory interest rate against which the 18 percent figure is measured, and does not clarify whether the lawsuits were filed by Marshall's office or by the collection agency acting on its own authority. Marshall's own quotes suggest the collection agency acted independently, but the Times report, as described in the Fox article, attributes the lawsuits to "Marshall and his lawyers."
Questions about Schumer's political relationships and potential conflicts of interest have surfaced in other contexts as well, though none directly connect to the Marshall story.
Marshall first won his congressional seat in 2016 and has built his political identity around his decades of medical service in rural Kansas. The Hamilton campaign is betting that the image of a doctor-turned-senator whose practice arrested patients over small debts will cut through partisan loyalty. Marshall is betting that Kansas voters will see the report for what he says it is: a Schumer-funded political operation dressed up as journalism.
Senate Republicans have blocked Schumer's legislative maneuvers before, but an opposition-research campaign laundered through a major newspaper, if that is what this is, operates on different terrain. Marshall will need more than indignation to answer the specific claims his opponent's campaign is making with attribution to Marshall's own attorney.
When a senator says he trusts Kansas judges more than the New York Times but also says he hasn't read the article, voters are left to fill in the gaps themselves. That is not a rebuttal. It is a bet that the messenger matters more than the message, and in Kansas, that bet may still pay off.