Too much money, I believe, is being wasted in the administration aspects. And we just really need to say to ourselves, can we focus some of those dollars on getting them back to physicians, hospitals, providers, and making the system more efficient? I think reducing regulatory burden on some physicians, I’m specifically thinking about our primary care physicians, our family physicians, is super important. Increasing GME spots is super important so that we have adequate number of providers for the entire country.

In a place like Arizona, I have to think about my voters and they’re experiencing extremely long delays when it comes to finding outpatient appointments. I can’t tell you the number of patients that I see in the ER, some huge percentage that don’t want to be discharged because they know that getting an outpatient appointment will be weeks to months.

They want you to take care of everything there or admit them because they know that their problems won’t get taken care of in a timely manner.

Dr. Dark: I’ve heard you burn through a lot of sneakers in knocking on all these doors. What shoes do you primarily wear for this exercise?

Dr. Shah: Believe it or not, I wear a very comfortable dress shoe. I don’t wear sneakers. I show up in business casual at most of these doors. In Arizona in the summer, we’re talking about 120-degree days. So in order to keep knocking, I had to improvise because I suffered from heat exhaustion more than once and nearly collapsed on the street several times.

When you do this alone, it can be kind of scary. So I bought two vests that were about $200 each. And they contain a material that is kind of like ice that is built into the vest, and you pop into the freezer overnight and you put one of them in your car in a cooler, and I would take them out with me. Each one would last about three hours. So I would go knocking with an ice vest on underneath my shirt. So when was 120 out, underneath my shirt, I was at 60 degrees. And it kept me cool, then knocked for three hours.

I would stop at a restaurant, eat lunch, change the vest out to the other vest, and then keep going for three more hours. And that’s how I was able to keep going through the 120-degree heat. It became something that I got known for in the state of Arizona—the ice vest.