AZ-06: Healthcare Drives Arizona Doc's Run for Congress
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current congressional representative, David Schweikert (R), voted for the American Health Care Act, which would have repealed the ACA but was stopped in the Senate.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.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/washington-watch/electioncoverage/88658