For more than two decades, Dr. Thomas Fisher has worked to improve health care as a board-certified emergency medicine physician in the same South Side Chicago community where he was raised. Dr. Fisher has been on the front lines of crisis, caring for patients who have been injured or sickened just trying to live — people whose pain is often dismissed as inevitable. But Dr. Fisher knows better. He’s seen how suffering stems not from personal failure, but from political choices. He’s running for Congress to change those choices.

Launching from Kenwood Academy, Dr. Fisher was educated at Dartmouth College, The University of Chicago School of Medicine and the Harvard School of Public Health. In the emergency department he serves everyone, no matter their background, means, or immigration status. And over time he realized that the ER is where America’s failures show up: housing insecurity, gun violence, mental health crises, and insurance denials. Over and over, Dr. Fisher cared for patients harmed by systems that put profits over people and too often punishes poverty.

So Dr. Fisher decided to take the fight upstream. With experience in government, industry, and academia, he has been fighting to improve lives his entire career.

In 2010 Dr. Fisher was selected as a White House Fellow, serving the Obama administration under HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius during the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. In that time Dr. Fisher delivered the 2011 HHS Action Plan for Reducing Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, a plan that directed the federal government to resolve health inequities. Dr. Fisher helped launch a Medicaid health plan that served over 80,000 people in Cook County, implemented ACA policies for Blue Cross plans in five states, and most recently, helped build new healthcare companies dedicated to improving health care for everyone.

But even while working on policy and systems, Dr. Fisher never left the bedside. He kept practicing emergency medicine, week after week, in the same South Side hospital where he began.

When COVID-19 hit, Dr. Fisher was there in the ER caring for Chicagoans sick with the virus and comforting families in their most difficult moments. He served patients stricken not only with a virus but exposed by a society that decides who is protected and who is not. These experiences were the basis for The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER, Dr. Fisher’s first book. The Emergency was based on the pandemic, but it told the story of inequality embedded in the health care system. With personal stories and a powerful critique of healthcare that hurts as much as it helps, the book was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Must-Read Books,” and has helped spark national conversations around health justice.

Now, as 17 million Americans are set to lose their insurance as a result of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, it’s clear we must take a new approach. Dr. Thomas Fisher is entering the race for Illinois’ 7th Congressional District not as a politician but as a physician who has witnessed the toll of injustice, disinvestment, and neglect in the bodies of the people who come to the emergency department for help. He’s seen firsthand what happens when people are faced with the impossible decision between affording rent and paying for medication. He knows that one day we will all need a hospital bed or face a cancer diagnosis – in time, calamity will fall on all of us. When that time comes, everyone deserves access to quality and affordable health care. As an emergency medicine physician, Dr. Fisher understands the urgency to fix our broken health care system and has the tools necessary to do so.

Dr. Fisher knows we can’t keep patching up a broken system, we need the vision and courage to fix this once and for all. Among Dr. Fisher’s top priorities are universal healthcare, affordable housing and gun violence prevention. He believes no one should suffer or die because they can’t afford to see a doctor. With experience across the clinical, policy, and insurance sides of healthcare, Dr. Fisher knows how to build a system that treats care as a right, not a privilege. The 7th district has a life expectancy gap of 30 years between Englewood and Streeterville. Closing that gap requires that we improve the ways we live, learn, work and play. Starting with housing, Dr. Fisher knows when people can’t afford a stable place to live, their physical and mental health suffer. That’s why he supports large-scale federal investment in affordable and public housing, alongside policies to combat segregation and displacement. He’s seen too many young people die from gun violence, and he supports bold federal action on gun safety, including an assault weapons ban, expanded background checks and weapon tracking. Dr. Fisher also knows people closest to the pain have the best ideas to fix it. It’s time Congress listened to them—and invest in community-based violence interventions.

Dr. Fisher’s priorities ensure that the folks in Illinois’ 7th Congressional District aren’t just scraping by but flourish. Together we can protect our most precious gift – the lives and bodies that let us love, hope, and come together. With hard work, moral clarity, and courage, Dr. Fisher believes in the power of policy to improve lives and will fight for a future that reflects the fact that we are all one.