82 of Kansas's 124 hospitals are Critical Access. We protect them.
What's wrong. What it costs the patient. What we're doing about it. This page lays out Doc's record on rural healthcare in three layers: the diagnosis, the prescription, and the receipts.
I'm an OB-GYN who delivered thousands of babies in rural Kansas hospitals before I ever ran for office. I've been in the room.
What we're doing about it.
- Improving Seniors' Timely Access to Care Act (S. 1816, lead with Warner)
- Patients Deserve Price Tags Act (S. 2355) — lead sponsor
- Medicare Advantage Improvement Act (with Whitehouse, April 2026)
- Telehealth permanence — CONNECT for Health Act (S. 1261) cosponsor
In detail.
Kansas has 124 hospitals. Eighty-two of them are Critical Access Hospitals — the highest count in the country. Per the Chartis Center for Rural Health (Jan. 2026), 63% of those are at financial risk. When a rural hospital closes, the next one is often an hour's drive away. Babies get born in the back of a pickup. People die who wouldn't have died. That is the diagnosis. Doc has spent twenty-five years on the labor-and-delivery side of that math.
On prior authorization, the Medicare Advantage denial process doctors and patients fight every day, Doc leads the Improving Seniors' Timely Access to Care Act (S. 1816). The bill puts 24- and 72-hour decision deadlines on prior-auth requests, mandates electronic standards, and gives CMS authority over timeframes. It has 63 Senate cosponsors and is supported by every major provider and patient-advocacy organization. In April 2026, Doc introduced the Medicare Advantage Improvement Act, which goes further: no more retroactive denials, no more automated denial algorithms, hard 72-hour caps.
Doc also leads the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act (S. 2355), which would require hospitals, surgery centers, imaging centers, and clinical labs to publish real upfront prices for the services Kansans actually use. Doc made the case in a March 2026 Fox News op-ed: opaque chargemaster pricing is one of the single largest drivers of medical debt for Kansas families. The bill codifies the Trump administration's transparency rules into statute so they cannot be rolled back by a future agency.
The Working Families Tax Cuts that Doc helped pass routed an additional $1 billion in Medicaid funding to Kansas in FY2026 and established the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Fund — the largest dedicated rural-health investment in a generation. When Freeman Hospital in Fort Scott needed to clear a CMS and KDHE certification log-jam to reopen, Doc's office worked it across the line. That is one rural hospital back online.
Telehealth permanence is the next fight. Doc cosponsors the CONNECT for Health Act (S. 1261) to make the COVID-era telehealth flexibilities permanent — because for a Kansan in a frontier county, a video visit with a specialist is the difference between getting care and going without.