This column has never been offsides. Never.
If you wake up on Monday mornings after a Chiefs loss and think the Chiefs are a bad football team and need wholesale changes, you need to reassess your life and we can’t be friends anymore. We are just one front office removed from the time we had a linebacker shoot his girlfriend at her home and then himself in the parking lot of the stadium. Those were bad times.
Dropped passes, penalties and baby fits are not bad times. Trust me on this.
Just when I thought state government couldn’t get much worse, I read a story in The Pitch about our government at work for us. The University of Kansas Medical Center has reached an agreement with the Liberty Hospital to basically take over the Liberty campus and make it part of the KU system.
Listen. I hate most things about Kansas. I’d rather walk through a year’s worth of Kansas City sewage than cheer for their basketball team, football team or say nice things about Johnson County drivers.
But I’m also not stupid. Well, I’m sometimes stupid, but not typically when it comes to sober common sense. KU Medical is good at the doctoring. They got lots of smart folks walking around that often fix the things that you and I have go wrong. If they can cure your cancer, fix your heart, brain or whatever, then I say come on over. Heck, stitch a Jayhawk in me if you must, but just save me is my general thought process, regardless of the state we are domiciled in.
I’m not stupid enough to love Missouri football enough to hate some super great surgeon with ties to the University of Kansas.
The kicker is that some of your Missouri elected officials have taken umbrage at this invasion of Kansas medical professionals. Kansas City Democrat Senator Greg Razer was quoted in the Pitch as saying the idea of KU owning a Missouri based hospital as “terribly wrong.” He went on to state, “There are boundaries for a reason, and they’ve crossed one.”
What? Damn you Missourians who try to save your life by driving three blocks into Kansas. What a travesty. Razer is quick on the trigger. He has pre filed a bill that would put a stop to the partnership that would prohibit partnering with an institution of higher education without voter approval.
What in God’s name are these people smoking? Are they trying to kill us? Not to be outdone by Democrats, Republican Senator Denny Hoskins of Warrensburg was quoted as saying, “That would be my concern from Missouri: Will a state-owned Kansas hospital put forth the necessary resources for a hospital in Missouri that does not serve any Kansas taxpayers.”
For the record, the KU Med system is not owned by the state of Kansas. It is not supported by state or local tax dollars, per The Pitch article.
I’m not sure if the Missouri politicians want to build a wall along State Line Road or they simply don’t understand what it’s like to seek medical solutions anyway or anywhere, but if these are the people protecting us, we don’t need any enemies because Missouri politicians got it covered.
I, for one, would encourage the state to go back to fighting about convenience store gambling devices or argue about Luetkemeyer’s K9 bills and leave our medical decisions out of their mouths.
(Guy Speckman can be reached at gspeckman@me.com or getting a colonoscopy from Bill Self)