By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
Sen. Roger Marshall was in Hays Friday morning to meet with community officials and business leaders.
Some of the topics the group discussed included health care, energy, broadband and wireless service.
Shae Veach, vice president of regional operations at Hays Medical Center, said the hospital has been as busy as ever.
"We just can't make any money," he said.
Pharmaceutical costs are through the roof, Veach said. The hospital does not benefit from the 340B program, which provides financial help to hospitals serving vulnerable communities to manage rising prescription drug costs.
Large, wealthy hospitals are qualifying for the program, but HaysMed is not, Veach said. Marshall said he would try to address that issue in Washington.
Labor costs and supply costs have increased as a result of inflation.
The cost of providing services is going up much faster than reimbursement rates, he said.
"We are not the gas station where we can just increase our costs. That is what we get from Medicare and Medicaid, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and third-party payers," he said.
Veach also talked about the addition of its child care facility, which will open this fall, and the need for housing to recruit and retain employees.
Eric Flax, CEO First Care Clinic, said the clinic's new pharmacy, which is set to open soon at 13th and Main in Hays, will qualify for the 340B program.
First Care already provides sliding-scale fees for patients for medical, dental and behavioral health services. This will be extended to the pharmacy when it opens, Flax said.
Flax said First Care also struggles to find qualified employees to do the front-line work, including dentists, behavioral health professionals and nurses.
Marshall said Medicaid is so broken, and it will never be the solution to providing health care to those in need. He said federally qualified health clinics, which includes First Care Clinic, are a better solution.
Marshall said a Senate committee that he is on was able to advance legislation that would limit pharmacy benefit managers.
"They take 84 cents of every dollar for a prescription," Marshall said. ... "There's three of them. They control 90 percent of the market. They are vertically integrated. They own the insurance company, the pharmacy, the retail pharmacy, and now they are owning the doctors and caregivers as well."
"It's the most horrible thing I have ever seen in health care," he said.
Energy
Ron Nelson of Dowing Nelson Oil said he did not like the White House's move to release oil from the strategic petroleum reserve.
He said he also opposes the listing of the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species. This could affect the ability of oil producers to drill wells in the prairie chickens' prime breeding ground. Marshall has also opposed the listing.
"We don't need any more rules and regulations," Nelson said.
Pat Parke, Midwest Energy CEO, said the utility's inability to procure transformers is slowing local development. He said it is taking up to two years to receive the transformers.
"The manufacturing companies are reluctant to increase their production capacity now if it's going to be obsolete in three years," he said.
Parke said recommended the Department of Energy wait to change its standards so the manufacturers can receive a return on their investment.
He also said anything that supports housing, child care, or rural health care helps Midwest Energy recruit.
He recommended student loan forgiveness for engineers. Although he said he is a Republican, he thought the federal government should rethink its position on immigration. He suggested immigrants could be helpful in dealing with the severe worker shortages in rural Kansas.
Although he did not mention immigration, Toby Dougherty, Hays city manager, also mentioned the need for more workers in Hays.
Parke said he would also like Kansas farmers to have opportunities to be a part of carbon sequestration.
He said although Midwest Energy has taken advantage of renewable energy, saving its customers millions of dollars, fossil fuels still need to be part of the energy system to maintain grid reliability.
As coal plants age out of the system, utilities are relying more on natural gas. However, the natural gas industry is deregulated.
He pointed to power issues in Texas during the winter of 2021.
"We don't have good coordination of electric and natural gas industries in this nation," he said.
Marshall said he sees modular reactors, which are defined as nuclear reactors generally 300 MWe equivalent or less, as a viable energy solution for Kansas in the future.
Wireless, broadband
Jimmy Todd, Nex-Tech CEO, also talked about issues the company was having with the supply chain.
Although the company has laid fiber, the electronic elements that connect users are wearing out and are in need of replacement. Nex-Tech is struggling to obtain parts that are manufactured overseas.
Todd said companies from outside of the state have received federal funds to expand rural broadband but haven't done anything in Kansas.
"They are creating Swiss cheese out of opportunities to expand the network. That makes it very difficult to make a business case for building ..."
He said he was concerned the latest round of funding is not going to go where it is truly needed.
Aaron Gillespie, Nex-Tech Wireless COO, said Nex-Tech is struggling against large companies like Verizon and AT&T that have hugely exaggerated their 5G maps.
Gillespie said they had 2.3 million challenges to Verizon and AT&T's maps.
"We are spending a ton of time and talent to drive our footprint," he said
"Our goal is to make sure that rural residents have equivalent technology to their counterparts," Gillespie added.
Precision ag has been a driver for that.
However, Todd said he has been on a federal committee that has made recommendations to the FCC and USDA on precision ag, and none of their recommendations have been implemented.