by RICK DANLEY // August 12, 2017
CHANUTE — The summer has hardly reached its down-curve and already a string of Kansas politicians are launching themselves across this imperfect rectangle in their 2018 run for governor.
Topeka physician and former state senator Jim Barnett met with local residents and healthcare professionals at the Neosho Regional Medical Center in Chanute on Thursday.
Barnett, who kicked off his gubernatorial campaign in June on the promise of uniting Kansans and repairing the “dismal results” wrought by the current administration’s experiment in radical tax cuts, has taken a run at this office before. He was the GOP’s nominee in 2006 but lost to incumbent Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. In 2010, Barnett, then in his ninth year as a state senator from an Emporia-centered district, tried but failed to beat back conservative firebrand Tim Huelskamp in the primary race for Kansas’s 1st Congressional District.
Since 2010, Barnett, who began his life in public service as a school board member in Emporia, has not aspired to another job in politics until now.
Kansas’s most recent election, however — which swept a raft of new GOP moderates into the legislature last August — gave Barnett some indication that voters’ sympathies were returning to the political middle.
Still, the Republican primary field is a crowded one, and Barnett’s fiercest challenge will come from the right. Currently, at least five candidates are throwing their sombreros into the ring: Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Wichita oil magnate Wink Hartman, Kansas Insurance Commissioner Ken Selzer and Lt. Gov. (soon to be governor) Jeff Colyer have all announced their candidacies. Ed O’Malley, who left the legislature to become CEO of the Kansas Leadership Center, is also exploring a run and will likely be the GOP candidate who challenges Barnett for shares of the center-right vote. A handful of other names, including Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Senate President Susan Wagle, have been rumored.
But many, Barnett included, think the ideologically rigid politics of the last six years have given way to a climate of greater compromise, that the time has come for a moderate, even Landon-style, Republican to regain the governor’s seat. The 63-year-old Barnett — with his high forehead, rimless spectacles and sunny disposition — even bears a faint resemblance to the popular 26th governor, who, like his future doppelganger, championed an equitable tax structure, robust spending on highways, and a fully funded and fairly funded system of public education.
“We hurt our state badly,” Barnett told the two dozen plus who gathered in the hospital conference room on Thursday. “I’m so glad the experiment is over. But we put ourselves in a very deep hole and it’s going to take a long time to get out. When I started looking at [running], and I saw how many difficult decisions needed to be made, I thought: ‘This next governor may just be a one-term governor.’ But,” continued Barnett, “we need a governor who is willing to do that.”
FRESH OFF an ag-focused listening tour in southwest Kansas, Barnett arrived this week in the southeast part of the state to talk health. Specifically, access to hospitals. More specifically, access to rural hospitals.
It’s a salient worry in this part of the state. In the fall of 2015, Mercy Hospital in Independence was forced to close its doors. (Where the hospital used to sit is now a gleaming, new parking lot.)
The reasons for Mercy’s closure are many-faceted: a difficulty finding and retaining doctors, the impression among residents that they’ll receive better care in big cities, basic population decline, a vacant industrial landscape and the diminished workforce that comes with it. But the fact that Gov. Brownback declined to expand Medicaid certainly didn’t help. According to the Kansas Hospital Association, because of this decision, Mercy Hospital lost close to $1.6 million in additional revenue every year in its last half-decade of life. The same group estimates that the decision has cost the state as a whole more than $2 billion, a number that continues to grow every day.
It’s a fact that still riles Barnett. “A community can’t stay alive, it can’t grow, without healthcare available and affordable to all. I made it clear from the outset that I am going to support Medicaid expansion.”
Especially now, said Barnett, when the state of the American healthcare system seems in near permanent flux. “We can’t continue to afford the way we’ve been doing it. … People are caught in this intersection of higher and higher costs [with] wages that haven’t kept up, which means that fewer and fewer people can afford healthcare. So, until we can fix that long-term, Medicaid expansion makes so much sense for the state.”
But Barnett’s purpose on Thursday was, as the Bible verse exhorts, to be swift to hear and slow to speak. “In this process of becoming governor, the most important thing for me … is to listen to what Kansans want.”
He went around the room: NCRM CEO Dennis Franks briefed Barnett on the Chanute hospital’s most urgent needs, calling convenient, affordable patient access his “number one priority.” Chanute’s executive director of economic development urged Barnett and his peers in Topeka to look beyond the I-35/I-70 corridors that pass through Wichita and Kansas City and return their attention to the often overlooked rural parts of the state. Someone from the Chanute Chamber of Commerce touted the area’s tourism opportunities.
Neosho Community College President Brian Inbody — after drawing attention to the fact that community colleges in Kansas have gone from being 33 percent state-supported institutions as recently as 2003 to the 12 percent state-supported institutions they are today — underlined the point that the fate of an entire community can very often depend on the health of its local hospital. “If rural hospitals begin to disappear, then workforce begins to disappear in rural areas, which means no one wants to live there because there aren’t any jobs [which creates] a spiraling-down effect that could soon get out of control.”
Tim Cunningham, the executive director of Tri-Valley Developmental Services, whose longstanding blood-and-thunder criticisms of Sam Brownback often assume the richness of an aria da capo, called the state’s 2012 decision to privatize its $3.4 billion Medicaid program and shift responsibilities for providing services to three managed-care companies “absolutely atrocious for everyone.”
“I can tell you that the last five years we have been in KanCare,” said Cunningham, whose primary beef is with the long-term support and services side of the program, “have been an absolute disaster. The funding cuts we’ve had to deal with, the cuts to services our [developmentally disabled population] has seen…. I mean, we haven’t seen any benefits from it on the support and services side at all. It’s just one giant layer of bureaucracy.”
The mild-mannered Barnett agreed in full. “We don’t have anybody in the state of Kansas that really understands Medicaid now, because we gave the keys away to the three managed care companies. This is one of those huge challenges for the next governor.”
Barnett spoke often, throughout Thursday’s hourlong forum, about the state’s many indigenous assets — its workforce, its universities, its agriculture, its tourism — but he seemed to circle around a theme that might, in its crudest form, be worded like this: Kansas is a great state, but one with a recent habit of getting in its own way.
“Think about it,” said Barnett. “Just think what we could do if we had a functional state government.”
This article originally appeared in The Iola Register on August 12, 2017.
