Kansas Rep. Gail Finney fought for you. Now, it’s time to fight for her.

Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. Mark McCormick is the former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum and a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission.

If you knew Wichita Rep. Gail Finney at all, you likely knew her from her work in the Kansas Legislature trying to help people with suspended driver’s licenses, trying to help children trapped in our foster care system, trying to get the state’s utility company to remove 105-foot towers from people’s front yards.

Her servant leadership set her apart. She really seemed to take her constituents’ needs and hardships to heart. Sadly, she died Aug. 20 at 63.

In her memory, Kansans should expand Medicaid. She fought for the policy, and it offers a great way to honor such a great and honorable person. This wouldn’t be a new fight, but her name and reputation can give it renewed purpose and focus.

Gail loved to laugh. She used to put out a magazine. She loved history. She also produced a Black Expo. In the Legislature, she pushed legalization of medical marijuana, the restoration of classroom funding, returning to annual state budgeting and revisiting tax credits.

But more than anything, the issue that might have been closest to her heart was Medicaid expansion.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly has pushed this idea during her administration, aiming to provide more than 150,000 Kansans with access to affordable health care. The measure also would create more than 23,000 new jobs, helping to shore up the Kansas economy.

“It’s time to work together to deliver for Kansans and get this done once and for all,” Kelly said, according to the Kansas Reflector. “Expansion would inject billions of dollars into our state, create thousands of jobs, help retain our health care workers in Kansas and help rural hospitals’ bottom lines.”

When Gail died, Kelly described her aptly as a “warrior.”

Gail proved to be the best kind of warrior, too. Not a weekend warrior, but the daily kind who never worried about the size of the opponent, only the depth of her constituents’ need. She took on the biggest, toughest opponents with the same focused tenacity that she brought to any task.

What you may not have known was how she suffered from illnesses and chronic pain, and how difficult it was for her to finally get that kidney transplant she needed. This gave her willingness to pick up a sword and shield and enter political arenas as often as she did even greater grandeur.

She likely did her best work in pain and agonizingly fatigued. Don’t let her smile and her glam fool you. Gail was tough.

But the fight for expansion in this state, and the fight for universal health care nationally, also have proven extraordinarily tough.

An August 2019 story in New York Times Magazine, titled “Why doesn’t the United States have universal health care? The answer has everything to do with race,” argued that America’s brutal brand of “low-road capitalism” and its racial caste system routinely thwarted such efforts.

The article draws a line roughly from the end of the Civil War to today. A 2019 book, “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland,” makes similar arguments. Many Americans would rather die than share health care with “undeserving” people.

But expansion benefits everyone. In fact, it likely would help the red, rural areas that seem most opposed to the measure. If the pandemic taught us anything, it was just how interconnected we remain despite efforts of a powerful minority to maintain an arbitrary separateness and to hoard resources.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called health care injustice inhuman.

Well, Gail fought on this front with her trademark dignity and the effortless way she rose above pettiness. Politicians like Bill Clinton turned the phrase “I feel your pain” into a cliche, but I’d never heard anyone question Gail’s sincerity as she advocated for her constituents.

We shouldn’t allow our loved ones to dissolve into piles of meaningless papers and documents once they die. We should try to fashion some enduring meaning from their lives and assemble our memories of them into colorful mosaics of purpose.

Hopefully, one of her legislative colleagues picks up this cause, affixes her name to a bill and rallies expansion support statewide and across party lines. Sometimes, important issues need a face to help close the emotional distance on matters that are practical but come with tons of wonky detail.

Gail deserves the recognition, and as she said, so many Kansans need and deserve the coverage.

Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.