It may not come as a surprise that an Arizona physician’s main motivation for running for Congress was (wait for it): healthcare.
The night of the 2016 election, “an overwhelming fear hit me — the threat of ‘repeal and replace’ would go through, and knowing what I knew as an ER physician, I was terrified to think we’d pull 20 million people off of healthcare,” Hiral Tipirneni, MD, said in a phone interview with MedPage Today, referring to President Trump’s support for getting rid of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). “The heartache that would cause for millions of American families — I said, ‘I have to do something.'”
The next morning, she was speaking with her two daughters, who were also upset by the election results. “I was sort of trying to motivate them, saying that we were going to get through this, and one thing I said was, ‘More women should run for office.’ My oldest daughter looked me square in the eye and said, ‘If not you, then who?'”
The next day, Tipirneni applied for the Emerge program, which is designed to educate women on how to run for office. “I didn’t know it was going to be a congressional run; I just knew I had to do more,” she said. But halfway through the 6-month program, her district’s current congressional representative, David Schweikert (R), voted for the American Health Care Act, which would have repealed the ACA but was stopped in the Senate. “It was that day that I decided to run for Congress,” she said. Tipirneni is running as a Democrat in Arizona’s 6th congressional district, which includes the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale.
Medical Career
Tipirneni was born in India but grew up on the west side of Cleveland; she received her MD degree at Northeast Ohio Medical University, in Youngstown, through an accelerated 6-year undergraduate/MD program. “It was 2 years of undergrad, 4 years of medical school, and going to school every summer,” she explained. “But I did one extra year before I went off to med school because I didn’t feel ready to be on that trajectory … I wanted a chance to take other classes, and it was good for me to take an extra year. I took graduate classes and got to tutor.” She then did an emergency medicine residency at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, while her husband was doing an orthopedic surgery residency at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
The couple moved west and got jobs in the Phoenix area, and they had their first child soon after. “I worked clinically for many years, for over a decade. I started out downtown in two different Level 1 trauma centers” and then moved into working at community hospitals. But things changed after Tipirneni lost both her mom and nephew to cancer over a few years. “I took a little break from clinical practice, then went back, and then I realized I wanted to do something different,” she said.
Tipirneni went to work for CSRA — now a unit of General Dynamics — “and I found amazing work in cancer research advocacy, using my science background to help vet research done by researchers mostly in North America — vetting it, managing peer review, making sure it was scientifically meritorious” and connecting the research to funding agencies, and helping bring the research to clinical trials. “I worked on experimental therapeutics, early diagnostic tools, genetic testing — in prostate cancer, breast cancer, and childhood leukemia,” she explained. “It was a good way to honor my mom’s and nephew’s memories, and I really found a lot of hope from it.”
‘Stop the Bleeding’
Looking now at the larger U.S. healthcare system, Tipirneni said she wants to keep and improve the ACA. “The first step is to stop the bleeding,” she said. “We have to stop the perpetual erosion of the ACA that the current administration is hellbent on doing — from day one they have been rolling back a lot of the protections.” She wants to “strengthen and stabilize the ACA, keeping the parts that work, including the cornerstone piece of protecting people with preexisting conditions; that is the whole foundation of the ACA that we have to make sure remains. That continues to be attacked.”
After that, “the next strongest step is introducing a robust public option, allowing Medicare to compete in the marketplace,” said Tipirneni. Doing so “is fiscally sound, offers additional choice for consumers, and drives down costs. That’s a plan conservatives should like as well as progressives; essentially, it’s Medicare for anyone who wants it.” She also wants to keep the current employer-based health insurance system. “There are 165 million people who have employer-based insurance; I’m not looking to pull the rug out from under them.”
Overall, “to me healthcare is a right,” she added, and the goal should be “quality, affordable healthcare for every American.” Improving the current system and adding a public option could be implemented fairly quickly, which is good because “I feel a sense of urgency; families are struggling day in and day out. This is a huge burden on their shoulders that I want to alleviate.”
More Emphasis on Prevention
Tipirneni also wants to see more emphasis on preventive care. “One-sixth of our economy is spent on healthcare — we have the highest per-capita spending on the planet — and we don’t have the best outcomes,” she said. “Part of it also is that we’re spending a large chunk of that in the last few weeks of life. If we were to spend some portion of that in prevention, early intervention, and more educational interventions as well, and got folks more educated in how to stay healthy and when to seek care, that would help reduce costs and improve outcomes.” More focus on the social determinants of health — food, housing, economic equity, and educational opportunities — also is needed, said Tipirneni. “All of those things contribute to a person’s overall health … It’s not enough to hand someone a healthcare card and say, ‘You’re insured.'”
The clinician payment system is another area that needs improvement, she said. “We have a very procedure- and volume-based health system. In this current pandemic, hospitals lost a lot of money because we put off elective surgeries and elective procedures that are a high source of revenue for hospitals, and in that, we’re losing our appreciation for value-based medicine. We want to focus on value-based care, on outcomes, and on the most efficient care of patients.”
Tipirneni had harsh words for the Trump administration on its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. “The pandemic was mishandled from day one,” she said. “Our administration and lots of folks in leadership did not fully let the science and data lead us and public health leaders lead us. We’re a study in what goes wrong when we let politics get in the way.” A large proportion of the COVID-19 cases and deaths “were avoidable … We didn’t initiate the Defense Production Act, we didn’t implement infrastructure for testing or contact tracing, and we did not have enough PPE [personal protective equipment]. A lot of issues are still in question and we find ourselves now at horrific numbers of lives lost and the economic consequences. It’s an abject failure of leadership.”
That’s one reason why a campaign like hers is needed, she said. “Now more than ever, people appreciate the idea of having physicians and scientists at the table, and we’re working hard to bring a data-driven approach to Washington.”
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
