Reporter’s Notebook: Who represents Kansas health-care consumers?

As I reported in last week’s cover story, Kansas lawmakers are swimming in campaign contributions from health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, medical societies and various other industry interests.

That doesn’t mean nobody in Topeka is representing regular people. The Kansas Health Consumer Coalition might not make campaign contributions to senators and representatives, but it’s trying to influence them in other ways — namely with facts, gathered through the hard work of actually talking to regular people. For example, there’s this video, which the Coalition made as part of a two-year project that brought together random people from Garden City, Overland Park and Pittsburgh, Kansas, to talk about their views on health coverage.