Back in It
Recharged on the coast, energized in Chicago, and doctors are done being quiet.
I owe you a newsletter.
Last week, my bike and I were on the coast of Delaware with a group of truly special friends, and I made a choice I don’t regret: I unplugged. Fully. The kind of rest where you remember who you are outside of the work — and come back to the work better for it.
I pedaled through a National Park. I ate good food. I laughed a lot. And yes, I made a pilgrimage specifically to Dogfish Head, home of my favorite standard brew — the 90 Minute IPA — which is as good on-site as you’d hope.
Rest is not the absence of the fight. It’s what makes the fight sustainable. I’m back — and I’ve got a lot to share with you.
Committee to Protect Health Care - National Organizing Summit
From the Delaware coast, I drove to Chicago.
The Committee to Protect Health Care held our first-ever in-person National Organizing Summit — and I had the honor of delivering the opening remarks as board chair. Over 40,000 physicians strong, and for the first time, a handful of us were together in the same room.
I didn’t know what to expect. What we got was beyond anything we could have imagined.
Physician advocates from across the country — every specialty, every region — showed up ready to work. The energy was electric. More than a few attendees told us afterward that this was the best meeting they had ever attended. I believe it, because I felt it too. We left Chicago energized, aligned, and clear-eyed about what comes next.
Our mission has never been complicated: we are doctors committed to ensuring our patients have access to quality, affordable health care. Period. No asterisks. No exceptions. Patients over profits — always.
If you want to learn more about the Committee or join us, hop in the chat or visit committeetoprotect.org.
Physicians, advocates, Wisconsin folks — what's energizing you right now? Let's talk.
Now. Let’s talk about Francesca Hong.
I sat down with Francesca to talk about her plan to improve healthcare for Wisconsinites. She came prepared — an 11-point healthcare plan, detailed and specific, built around the real barriers families in this state face every day. You can read the whole thing on her website. We walk through it together in the episode.
But the conversation that’s stayed with me is the one about who she is and where she comes from. Francesca Hong is a proud service industry worker. She knows what it means to not have the safety net. To be on your feet, to hustle, to build something — and to do it without the cushion that too many people in power have never had to live without.
That’s not a liability. That’s a qualification.
Then the news broke. Capital One filed a lawsuit over roughly $30,000 in debt her campaign says she accumulated as a small business owner — debt they say is now paid off. It was framed as a hit. Her campaign turned it into a mirror.
People are struggling. Even people running for governor. Especially people who built something from scratch without a trust fund or a safety net. The “scandal” is every American’s story.
I cut a reel that says exactly that.
Science Just Said What I’ve Been Saying
A peer-reviewed study just published in Nature Human Behaviour confirmed something I’ve watched unfold in exam rooms and policy debates for years.
Conservative Americans are experiencing significantly worse health outcomes and higher mortality rates than liberals — a gap that barely existed before the 2010s and has been widening ever since. The researchers used individual-level medical records and death data. This isn’t a poll. This is not an opinion. This is data.
Two mechanisms explain it. The first: demographic shifts that brought less-healthy populations into the conservative coalition. But that alone doesn’t account for the full gap by the 2020s. The second mechanism is the one that really gets me — declining trust in medical professionals among right-leaning Americans. Lower willingness to seek care. Less likely to follow clinical advice or believe their medications work — even for conditions that have absolutely nothing to do with COVID-19 or politics.
People are dying from preventable illness because they’ve been taught — by politicians and by media — not to trust their doctors and healthcare workers.
This is what the politicization of medicine costs. Not abstractions. Lives.
A Controversial Start to Pride Month in Outagamie County, Wisconsin
June is Pride Month, and I celebrate it — loudly, without hesitation.
So I was gutted when I learned that on the very first day of Pride Month, someone removed the Pride flag from the Outagamie County Courthouse and attempted to set it on fire. He was arrested.
And within three hours, a new flag was flying.
That’s the part I want you to sit with. County leadership moved fast and moved clearly: this will not be tolerated here. The same courthouse where a bust of Joe McCarthy stood until just 25 years ago now flies a Pride flag — and the community fought to keep it there.
We don’t get to be complacent. But we do get to notice when people in power do the right thing. That matters too.
What are you seeing in your community this Pride Month? Tell me.
Officer Craig Carlson gets his final 10-42
I want to take a moment for someone who has given 27 years to the Green Bay community.
In law enforcement, 10-42 is the radio code for end of watch — the signal that your shift is done. After 27 years, Officer Craig Carlson has finally earned his. And he got it from his youngest daughter Maddy, who is carrying on the family tradition of public safety in her role as a dispatcher.
Craig has retired from the Green Bay Police Department, and Green Bay is a little better because of every one of those years. He served on SWAT, the Dive Team, and the Marine Unit. But what Craig is truly known for is his work as a community police officer — someone who showed up not just to respond to calls, but to build relationships, to lean into prevention, to be present in the fabric of the neighborhood.
That’s the kind of service that doesn’t make headlines, but it’s the kind that actually makes communities safer.
Craig — thank you. Enjoy every moment of what comes next. You’ve more than earned it.
On Deck…
Seven candidates are running for governor of Wisconsin. I'm sitting down with each of them — this time with a laser focus on healthcare and what sets them apart.
Francesca Hong was first. Missy Hughes is coming up next. Stay right here for the rest.
From Delaware to Chicago to Green Bay — and right back to the work. I'm glad to be back. I'm more ready than ever.
Let's go.
💙 Kristin
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The part that feels clinically central here is that trust is not only an attitude toward medicine. It is part of the infrastructure of care.
When it is intact, a physician’s recommendation does not have to start from zero each time, and the visit can move toward the illness, the risk, the decision in front of the patient. When it has been damaged outside the exam room, by politics, by profit, by a bad prior experience, the encounter changes before anyone sits down. Advice gets heard as pressure. Uncertainty gets heard as incompetence. A prescription gets heard as someone’s hidden interest. The doctor may be saying the same words, but they are landing in a different room.
That is what makes the loss so expensive. It does not only produce bad opinions about medicine; it consumes the very time and attention medicine needs in order to work. A ten-minute visit becomes part diagnosis, part repair, part proof that the person across from you is not the enemy you were taught to expect.
So maybe the question is not only how physicians rebuild public trust in some civic, abstract sense. It is how much clinical care quietly becomes impossible when every encounter has to spend its first energy rebuilding the ground it was supposed to stand on.