Nick Graham recently wrote that Bourbon County will never get another Western Insurance company. On first reading, I mentally nodded my head in agreement, but then paused. While on one level, he is right—the probability of a large insurance company wanting to come to Bourbon County and employ 1,000 people is extraordinarily close to zero—the actual history of the Western illustrates his point of the need for business investments and an environment that allows growth.

The Western didn’t just “come to Fort Scott” and start employing a thousand people. The idea for what became The Western Automobile Indemnity Association was dreamed up in 1910 and it started business the next year. It survived the Great Depression due to careful financial management and grew into a holding company that owned a variety of businesses. By the 1950s a 20-year-old Warren Buffett discovered the company’s stock could be had for $16 a share, while it was producing profits of $20 per share. It became one of his earliest investments and a model for the type of value investing that grew his fortunes.

In 1967 the Western built what amounted to a tiny skyscraper downtown with an investment of over $11 million in today’s dollars because they were outgrowing the space they had in the Scottish Rite Temple building.

In 1981, the Tribune ran a story saying that the city had agreed to annex property south of Fort Scott where the Western planned to put an 80,000-square-foot building. This space would be used to house their computers and other offices. The city approved industrial revenue bonds of up to $22 million (in 2026 dollars). Since industrial bonds would make the building free from property taxes while the bonds were being repaid, the Western said they intended to make “payments in lieu of taxes.”

I remember being at the picnic on the grounds of that building after it was built. They had stocked the pond and I caught what, to an 8-year-old, seemed like the biggest catfish in the world. My father worked at the Western as a programmer and would occasionally get called in at night to fix an errant computer job that needed to get a clean run before the morning. I remember going with him, pulling up to the property gate in the dark and dealing with the security process to open the gate, walking from the parking lot to the door where more security verified we were supposed to be there and then entering the massive dark building. We made our way to the computer bunker where the bright lights made it feel like we had just stepped into daytime again. The room had a raised floor that hid miles of cable and pushed the constantly running air-conditioning into the giant computers. The light was a good thing. It made it easy to avoid the gaping holes in the floor where an occasional large tile had been removed to help cool a particular work area for some of the operators. The inefficient (by today’s standards) electronics put out a tremendous amount of heat and required a massive battery installation and huge generators to guarantee they wouldn’t crash if the power went out.

Our family, like many others, depended on the Western’s ability to provide what the market needed. The Western was very good at doing this and the demand for what the Western provided created the demand for my father’s programming skills and created the job that put food on our table just like so many others in the area.

The Western had a huge economic impact on the city and county. It wasn’t just the people who got a paycheck from the Western either. Those paychecks funded many of the other jobs, and the paycheck from those jobs funded others. The company paid taxes that helped fund the government. With the large real-estate holdings it made up a not insignificant portion of the Bourbon County tax base. But 75 years of growth culminated in a $270 million deal selling the company to Lincoln National. Over time it was rebranded as American States, and later sold to Safeco. By the end of the millennium all the jobs were gone. One of the downtown structures was torn down and the other sold for $1 and converted to apartments.

The nature of business in 1910, 1967, and 1981 is very different than it is in 2026. It does seem unlikely that any company is going to give the county the type of investment in office real estate that creates a taxable footprint bringing in the $1 million to $2 million that the Western would have likely been paying in today’s dollars. There aren’t a lot of probable futures where a company heavily invests in an existing downtown office building, runs out of space, puts in an $11 million mini-skyscraper and later follows up with another $22 million expansion on property it asks to be annexed to the city.

The massive inefficient computers used a tremendous amount of electricity in their operation and cooling. The entire setup with the rest of the equipment in the tornado-proof bunker wasn’t technology that was well understood by many of the people in the town who weren’t actively working on the computers. The process of writing code using flow charts and diagrams and then going over to a shared terminal to type in code that ran against the miles of black magnetic tape stored on large spools probably looked like a lot of black magic to people of a time when home computers were just beginning to hit the market. But it all represented a free market where technology was being used to rapidly move forward to solve the problems of the time.

The world is different now, the entire bunker of computing power I visited as a child, could all be replaced with an inexpensive laptop or even your phone. And the work done by all the people in those rows of cubicles has been replaced by a few individuals with more efficient tools today. But at the time, all the infrastructure, all the investment in buildings and human capital was exactly what was required to support the national need for insurance. Meeting that need brought millions of dollars from the nation into Bourbon County.

The world’s needs are different today. There is no massive funnel of money waiting to come to the area if we just build a new building and fill it with 1,000 people trying to mimic the way work was done 50 years ago. So in that sense Nick is right. You couldn’t grow the Western today, but you also couldn’t have grown the Western if they had tried to start the same thing in 1810. It was the right solution for the needs of the time and that particular solution is entirely unfit for the unique needs of any other time.

For this area to thrive from the type of economic growth that came from the Western in the past, we can’t continue to focus on how our county met the needs of the past—needs that don’t exist anymore.  We need to be focused on how we can meet the needs that exist today—the needs where there is growing demand going forward.

If we are unable or unwilling to do this, the county will die. Not right away, but it will fade away through hundreds of small losses with no wins of any significance. As businesses close, they won’t be replaced. As the tax base shrinks, everyone will have to pay more and get less. As taxes go up, it will be harder to justify moving to the area and harder for those who are here to justify staying. (And the idea of being unwilling to do this isn’t hypothetical, it is definitely happening.)

But, if we do follow the model of the Western by focusing on what the market needs today, our kids and grandkids will look back on the coming years the same way we look back on the apogee of the Western. With a fondness for the past, but with determination to follow the tradition they saw clearly modeled for them on how to move forward, adapt, and change in meeting the new needs of the nation and world, needs that we probably can’t even imagine today.

Mark Shead

Note: FortScott.biz publishes opinion pieces with a variety of perspectives. If you would like to share your opinion, please send a letter to [email protected].

This is the third and final installment in a series on the future of Bourbon County healthcare that is being cross-published by BourbonCountyMonitor.com and FortScott.biz. The first part can be found here, and the second can be found here.

Fort Scott, KS – While Freeman Health Systems as an organization is from all appearances on strong financial footing, the Freeman Hospital Fort Scott operation has experienced a series of documented substantial financial blows since opening in September 2025.

The Delay

Freeman began hiring for the Fort Scott hospital in spring 2025, with an expected June 1 opening. But on May 27, Four States Homepage reported the opening had been pushed to September because interior renovation issues had delayed the state survey needed before the hospital could open.

At the time, Freeman Health System Rural Hospitals CEO Renee Denton said Freeman had already hired slightly more than half the staff needed to open the facility. One employee hired during that period told the Monitor that Freeman continued paying them throughout the delay.

Medicaid and Medicare Certification Delay

The opening delay was followed by another financial setback: a lengthy wait for certification to bill Medicare and Medicaid.

At an April 16 joint meeting of the Bourbon County and Fort Scott City commissions, County Commissioner Gregg Motley, former vice chairman of the Freeman Fort Scott board, said the hospital had been seeing most patients at no cost while awaiting certification. Motley said more than 70% of Freeman Fort Scott patients were covered by Medicare or Medicaid, and the hospital hoped to retroactively bill for much of that care.

At the May 7 ribbon-cutting, Freeman Fort Scott Chief Administrative Officer Anita Walden told the Monitor the approvals had come through, but collecting payment for the previous nine months would not be simple. Walden said some payers were allowing Freeman to backdate claims to its certification date, while others were not.

A memo Motley sent to the County Commission also said Freeman had expected another health care provider to shift its lab work to the Fort Scott hospital. Instead, the provider stayed with its existing lab vendor, creating what the memo described as a seven-figure hole in Freeman’s planned budget.

“They’re not happy with their current situation.”

In an interview with the Monitor, Motley said those losses, combined with the roughly $1.4 million in lost revenue from the unlicensed 10 beds and growing maintenance problems in the building owned by Kansas Renewal Institute (KRI), have left Freeman in an untenable position.

“They’re not happy with their current situation,” Motley said. “They’ve received financial blow after financial blow. It was extremely disappointing to them that they will not be operating those 10 beds. They were hiring based on that.” Motley called it a “big budget hole.”

The Legal Action

That legal action Motley is advocating for would invoke the “clawback” clause in the original donation agreement between the county and Legacy Healthcare Foundation — which now also applies to KRI — transferring the property back to the county.

Under that clause, the county’s only remedy if the building owners default is to take back the property plus a cash repayment that shrinks over time — $1 million in year one, $750,000 in years two through four, and $500,000 in year five. After that, the county can reclaim nothing.

Motley said that window closes in November 2027. He said the $10,000 in legal fees approved by the commission during the April 14 meeting will go toward getting a legal opinion on whether the county has a strong case for reclaiming the building, and whether it can be accomplished within a reasonable amount of time and cost.

According to Motley, state officials had Kansas City-based Polsinelli Law Firm review the donation agreement, and the firm concluded the agreement had been breached. Motley said Freeman’s attorneys agreed with Polsinelli’s assesment.

The Transfer

Motley said that the lynchpin to this plan is Freeman agreeing to take the building, including all maintenance responsibilities. Motley says the healthcare provider has shown interest in doing so, but the county will require a binding legal agreement with them before initiating legal action to reclaim the building.”The county does not want this [building],” Motley said. “Before we ever file a lawsuit, we have to have an ironclad agreement with Freeman that says we are going to take over the building and the full maintenance of it.”Motley, who was voted as the commission’s point-man for the process, said that Kansas City-based MSB Law has been engaged to provide the legal opinion for the county.

The Employees

When asked what happens to the roughly 150 employees of KRI if the county is able to reclaim the building and transfer it to Freeman, Motley says that Freeman has discussed opening an operation similar to KRI in the building.”Well, again, Freeman hasn’t committed anything, but they have a KRI-like operation in Southwest Missouri called Ozark Center. And their plan would be to open a facility similar to that, get licensed for the 10 beds,” Motley said.Motley said the fate of KRI’s employees has been at the forefront of his mind. He said he told Freeman he wouldn’t pursue the deal unless they were committed, and that he asked what would happen to the workers.

“Where do you think we would get any employees to do the operation? We would look hard at the existing employees,” Motley said Freeman responded.Motley said the human cost has weighed heavily on him. He said the employees’ fate is “a huge concern of mine,” and that he pushed to keep the discussions private specifically to shield the people he knows and loves that work there.

The Lesser of Two Evils

Motley framed the choice as the lesser of two bad options. “I have to put them at risk a little bit in order to consider the whole county here,” Motley said.”I think the worst thing that could happen is we do nothing. KRI closes, all those people are gone. They don’t have a Freeman to go to now. Pasadena Lending or Legacy forecloses on the building and now we (sic) got an empty building owned by an organization that we know is ill intended.”

For Motley, the priority is maintaining ER and hospital services in Bourbon County, and that inaction on the part of the county puts those in the greatest amount of danger.”Any path we take is going to be risk. Any path. What’s the path of least risk? It is a huge risk to do nothing,” Motley said. “You know, you have two entities losing significant money every month. And what’s Freeman’s affinity for Fort Scott apart from ‘we have a break-even operation’? There is none.”

The Future

Regardless of what legal opinion the county receives, the commission’s direction remains uncertain. The board has been frequently and publicly divided.

During the March 9 meeting, which was the first time the commission discussed the potential legal action behind closed doors, the vote to go into closed session was not unanimous, with Commissioner Mika Milburn-Kee casting the sole dissenting vote.The first public vote on the legal action came at the April 14 commission meeting. Milburn-Kee again cast the lone vote against going into the executive session that preceded it, which included Pam Lanier, Freeman Health System’s director of government relations; state Rep. Rick James; state Sen. Tim Shallenburger; Fort Scott City Manager Brad Matkin; and County Counselor Bob Johnson.

After returning to open session, the commission voted 3-2 to approve a motion from Motley allocating $10,000 for legal fees and title work. Motley, Commissioner Joe Allen and Commissioner David Beerbower voted in favor; Milburn-Kee and Commission Chairman Samuel Tran opposed.

During a recess that followed, Tran was recorded saying, “We should have this conversation before we threw 10 Gs onto this dumpster fire.”During the April 27 meeting, after an identical split vote affirming the vote on April 14 and Motley’s appointment as contact person, Tran again expressed apprehension with the legal action.”And I’m saying nay for the same reason that I said no the very first time, because I don’t think this should be our wheelhouse,” Tran saidPrior to another 3-2 split vote during the May 4 meeting confirming a short list of law firms for Motley to approach for the legal opinion , Milburn-Kee requested that the details of the legal action be discussed publicly.”Can we move this discussion to the public, please, so we can talk more freely about what we’re asking them to do because I don’t even know what we’re asking them to do,” Milburn-Kee said.

Freeman’s Statement

In response to a request for comment regarding Freeman’s agreement with KRI and Freeman’s long-term viability in Fort Scott, Freeman Health System’s Media Relations Coordinator Kevin McClintock provided the following statement to the Monitor:

“As for KRI, we worked closely with their team to complete renovation of the hospital space, and we successfully passed licensure and life-safety surveys. Additionally, we look forward to working with KRI as we make necessary updates to the MRI suite. Freeman is not in a position to comment regarding KRI’s financial condition or ability to obtain licensure. Freeman Health System will continue to operate responsibly and make thoughtful decisions to ensure long-term sustainability while advancing access to care and remaining focused on meeting the healthcare needs of the rural communities we serve.”Because this reporting was expanded into a three-part series, the Monitor extended KRI an additional opportunity to comment. KRI did not respond before publication.