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As part of 番茄社区app's occasional series on healthcare clinicians running for office, Washington Editor Joyce Frieden spoke via phone with Rich McCormick, MD, MBA, an emergency physician in Lawrenceville, Georgia, who is running for U.S. Congress in the 7th district, which includes portions of northeast Atlanta. The first contest in that election is the primary in May 2022.

McCormick didn't start out his career wanting to become a doctor. Rather, he spent 16 years as a pilot in the Marine Corps, with tours of duty in places like Rwanda and Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Toward the end of his time in the Marines, McCormick was offered a chance to work at the Joint Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was really excited about it -- until he found out that he would be away from home 9 months out of the year and working long hours even when he was at home.

"I knew my wife was already struggling at the time, because we had one child who was young and she was pregnant with our second son," said McCormick. "And so I was like, 'Ooh, she's not going to survive that.' So I thought about it and prayed about it, and I thought, 'You know what? I'm supposed to be an ER doctor.' Now, this a guy who -- I didn't even have pre-med then; I didn't know how you get into medical school. I didn't know anything about medicine. Not a thing."

Lobbying on Surprise Billing

He ended up being placed in a military teaching position at Georgia Tech and Morehouse College. He was able to complete his pre-med studies and go on to medical school at Morehouse and an emergency medicine residency at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta under the auspices of Emory University.

"Usually you do your in-service and residency in the military, but I got much better training at Emory and Grady than you'd ever get in the military for emergency medicine," McCormick said. "I was very fortunate to have that, and I went back in the military and served out my time as an ER doc at Camp Lejeune and was the head of emergency medicine in Kandahar."

His decision to run for Congress was equally unusual; it started out with going to the state capitol in Atlanta with the Medical Association of Georgia to lobby on the issue of surprise billing.

"It was the Republican who is the chair of the committee that was hearing us, that I felt was a bad person," he said. "I just felt like they were obstructive. They were trying to submit their own competing bill that was special-interest-driven from insurance companies and not a fair solution at all. Our solution was bipartisan; it was backed by a patient advocacy groups. And I felt like it was a very fair solution, and he was not letting us have a fair hearing."

"It got me so mad," he continued. "I was like, 'Man, we gotta go talk to the governor.' I was very angry. And they're like, 'You're gonna get kicked out of here if you're not careful. That's not how this works down here.'"

McCormick's colleagues in the surprise billing effort said to him at lunch one day, "'Well, if you want to be part of the solution, you have to be at the table and not on the menu. And right now we're on the menu. So would you like to run?' And I said, 'Well, if that's what it takes to fix something around here, then I guess so.'"

First Political Effort in 2020

In his first effort -- the 2020 race to replace retiring congressman Rob Woodall (R) -- McCormick beat out six other candidates in the Republican primary but narrowly lost the general election to Democrat Carolyn Bordeaux. Now he is running again for the 2022 election, this time hoping to unseat her.

As for his stance on COVID-19, McCormick emphasized that he is "all for vaccinations" and that he and his family are all fully vaccinated; he will soon be getting a booster shot. "But what I'm very concerned about is when we start forcing the issue," he said, referring to the Biden administration's "vaccinate or test" mandate for large businesses, which is currently suspended due to a court order.

"There's a severe labor shortage in certain businesses -- construction, in the textile industry, in certain other industries -- where you have to pay an enormous amount of money to recruit and retain [employees]," said McCormick. "If you lose 10% of your people because they don't want to be tested, or they don't want to be vaccinated ... now you have to compete for more employees. And if you can't get that, maybe that's going to put you out of business."

These vaccine mandates for businesses are occurring at a time when "you have hundreds of thousands of people showing up to football and baseball stadiums all across the United States, both at high school, college, and pro level. They're not showing their vaccination card," yet there haven't been major COVID outbreaks from those events, he said.

He feels similarly about mask mandates. "Everybody has a decision to make, because this is never going to go away," McCormick said. "If you want to wear a mask for the rest of your life, absolutely wear your mask. But if you're going to tell people to wear a mask for the rest of their lives because we're never going to be safe -- no, I don't think so."

That stance included airplanes and other forms of transit: "There is a time where that was appropriate -- it was time to take all precautions and maybe not even allow people to travel. But we're past that time," he said.

"Fairly Mainstream" in Medicine

As to which treatments to give patients, "I'm fairly mainstream when it comes to medicine," said McCormick. "I agree with almost all my peers on almost everything when it comes to healthcare," although he has differences with some physicians over his views of the healthcare system. "I wear face masks at work all the time. I am vaccinated. So I'm very much along the same lines as my fellow doctors who are treating patients ... There's no practice I'm doing in emergency medicine that's outside the purview of anybody else's practice in my emergency practice."

For treating COVID, "I don't treat with ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine," he said. "I'm not against it, but that's not what I do. But I'm very much for doctors having the liberty to treat according to what they believe is right."

When it comes to improving the healthcare system's financing, McCormick said he is a fan of the system used in Singapore, in which everyone has their own health savings account (HSA) -- partially funded by their employer -- to cover costs up to a certain point, after which costs are picked up by insurance. "If you don't get to the end of [your HSA funds], then you are rewarded by having a rollover the next year, which means less money out of your pocket," he said. In addition, there is more price transparency, "so if you're paying attention to what's in your HSA and you're buying a drug, you buy the drug that makes the most sense for you."

Cutting down on the paperwork hassle is another important issue for healthcare, he said. "Part of the problem right now is the amount of regulation we have ... We spend over 25% of every dollar on administration with any practice, because you have to give your work to either the federal government or to an insurance company, and then they usually go back and forth. That's usually a fight for every dollar. And we have a pre-approval process that's ridiculous."

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