How the 7 healthcare workers who just got elected to Congress plan to fix our broken system
· Vox
Last week’s blue tsunami carried a lot of white coats: At least seven newly elected Democrats have medical degrees or nursing careers. Pediatrician Annie Andrews of South Carolina scored one of the most shocking Senate victories of election night for Democrats, while Abdul El-Sayed (who earned a medical degree before working in public health) won the all-important Michigan Senate race. In the House, Democrats will soon welcome pediatrician Richard Pan of California, emergency room physician Amish Shah of Arizona, surgeon Adam Hamawy of New Jersey, emergency nurse Mitchell Berman of Wisconsin, and oncology nurse practitioner Kristina Knickerbocker of Ohio.
Like many Democrats, these candidates campaigned on lowering costs, expanding health coverage, and confronting the drugmakers and healthcare corporations that they accuse of putting profits ahead of patients. They have endorsed big ideas to make healthcare better, from a public insurance option to Medicare-for-all, alongside targeted changes to drug prices and health insurance denials.
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With President Donald Trump still in the White House, Democrats’ healthcare agenda faces obvious obstacles in the short term. But I spoke with Pan and Shah this week to learn how they hope to influence the healthcare conversation in Washington going forward.
They may be politicians, but they have seen America’s broken healthcare up close. They’re hoping to help some of their new colleagues, who may not have those same experiences and may be prone to thinking of policy issues in abstract terms, understand the urgency and the human toll of our messed-up medical system. And as lawmakers try to come up with solutions to fix those problems, they’ll be there to make sure those policies actually make sense in practice.
“For us, these policy discussions are not abstract,” Pan said. “As a practicing physician, I know what it’s like to be on the front lines and have to look a patient in the eye and even tell them that, well, these programs either exist or don’t exist, and we’re not going to be able to get you help. And those are the types of things I have to deal with each time I see a patient.”
What practicing medicine teaches you about politics
The new members will join a small but notable group of providers-turned-politicians: The Congressional Doctors Caucus, founded last year, had six Democratic members before last week’s midterms. Shah, who previously served in the Arizona legislature, told me that he believed his medical career had given him a valuable outlook for thinking about how to serve in political office.
“The core function of practicing medicine is to care for people,” Shah said. “The same should really be true about politics.”
He’s experienced the shocking inequities of US healthcare, and seen its impact on people’s well-being, firsthand. Earlier this year, Shah said, an uninsured woman came into his emergency room department with an allergic reaction. His team treated her successfully. But she was worried about the bill, asking if she might have to pay a $10,000 charge after she was discharged. And Shah told me that he had to be honest with her that she might.
That’s when he learned that his patient was her family’s breadwinner — and that she actually worked in a nearby emergency department. Somebody who helped provide emergency care to others couldn’t afford it herself.
“It’s a tragedy that those of us who actually go out to help others and be part of the team that saves lives can be left without insurance,” Shah said.
Pan, a former California state senator, described a similar experience while treating kids in primary care. He has seen all the ways US health care is lacking: children who don’t get the mental health support they need to excel in school, families that struggle to afford stable housing or find healthy food. His ability to help depended on decisions made well outside his examination room.
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“These are all things that certainly have potential policy solutions, but it’s not just theoretical,” he told me. “It is very real and tied to very specific patients that I’ve seen.”
But while these experiences have made them eager to change things, the newly elected physicians are also mindful about how proposed changes could disrupt ongoing patient care. Pan said he wants to push his colleagues about both the intended and unintended consequences or new policies: Who will get help? What happens to people whose needs don’t fit neatly into boxes? As any doctor will tell you, every patient is unique.
That’s especially true for people with chronic conditions, he said, who may have spent years finding the right doctors and treatments. Lawmakers have to strike a balance: identifying ideas that will improve the health system in the long term, without jeopardizing the care that people need right now.
Shah said he hopes his experience as a physician can help Congress find a middle ground between the patients demanding reform and the providers who are wary of big changes. After decades in medicine and a stint in the state legislature, he knows the different players and their concerns.
“I speak the language of healthcare,” he said. “I’ve earned the trust of a lot of those stakeholders that I will not take an axe to the system, but rather reform it in a way that really improves it and centers the patient. So that gives me a unique ability to improve this at the congressional level.”
What the new doctors and nurses want to change
These Democratic doctors, like their party’s leaders, have a clear No. 1 priority when they take office next year: reversing the $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts that Republicans passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025.
“Given all the damage the Republicans did in the past two years, first we got to triage to stop the bleeding,” Pan told me. He wants to repeal the OBBBA’s Medicaid work requirements, restore the lapsed Affordable Care Act tax credits that helped reduce premiums for millions of Americans, and protect Medicare payments. Those were common themes across these physician-politicians: Andrews, Berman, and El-Sayed endorsed the same policies as part of their campaign platform, while Knickerbocker likewise pledged to protect Medicaid, Medicare, the ACA, and children’s health coverage.
Beyond reversing the Republican cuts, the newcomers want to cover more people, though they have different ideas about how to do it.
“You have these real stories that then drive the legislation, and give you the ideas to solve the problems for people.”
Amish Shah, emergency room physician elected in Arizona
Shah said he supports letting people buy into Medicare. Andrews, Berman, Knickerbocker, and Shah have also endorsed a public option: a government-backed health insurance plan that would compete with private plans. El-Sayed and Hamawy, meanwhile, say they favor Medicare-for-all, guaranteeing comprehensive coverage without premiums or out-of-pocket costs.
“I want to see every United States citizen covered, and I’d like to see the premiums drop,” Shah said.
But even the people who have health insurance often struggle to pay for medical care. Andrews, Berman, El-Sayed, and Hamawy have all proposed expanding the government’s negotiation of prescription drug prices. Andrews and Berman want to extend Medicare’s $35 insulin cap to private insurance. Andrews, Berman, and Hamawy also want to crack down on private equity ownership and consolidation among healthcare providers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these doctors were not afraid to get into the weeds of healthcare policy on the campaign trail. Andrews’s detailed plans include limits on some hospital prices and changing Medicare payments so the same service costs the same regardless of where it is performed. Berman’s agenda draws on his own nursing experience: He wants nurses to help set staffing standards, more funding for nursing education, and enhance workplace safety for medical workers, a goal he shares with Shah. In Arizona, Shah worked on protections for healthcare workers, and he wants Congress to focus on the problem too.
Pan also wants to figure out how to restore trust in public health after two years of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. undermining faith in vaccinations and other medical science. He helped write California laws tightening exemptions from school vaccination requirements; in Congress, he wants stronger oversight of the administration’s healthcare agencies, including probing any possible corruption, and stronger protections for scientific decision-making. He told me that lawmakers may want to consider creating new safeguards into law so future administrations have less latitude to overhaul public health policy.
“The American people need accurate information from their government,” Pan said. “We might want to rethink how to put better guardrails so that someone like an RFK Jr. in the future couldn’t…basically upend everything.”
Andrews and Shah have also placed a lot of emphasis on fixing prior authorizations, one of the most common frustrations for patients and providers alike.
Shah recalled that he once met a Republican constituent who said he was completing prior authorization paperwork on behalf of the doctor treating his son, who had muscular dystrophy, because the doctor’s office was overwhelmed. He was shouldering an absurd administrative burden as a layperson, just so his child could get the care he needed.
And so, Shah worked on legislation to streamline the prior authorization process. A 2021 law standardized prior authorization forms and limited their length to two pages, excluding supporting medical documentation. He sees his state work as a possible model for federal legislation.
“We really need to start looking at these denials,” he said. He wants more scrutiny of decisions that are later overturned and of automated and increasing AI-driven systems that reject people’s claims without meaningful review.
It’s another example of how these freshman members will be ready to dive into the weeds of fixing healthcare. The question will be whether the new lawmakers can translate their direct experience with patients’ frustrations into changes that make getting healthcare care easier.
“You have these real stories that then drive the legislation,” Shah said, “and give you the ideas to solve the problems for people.”