Of course, there are already 15 physicians in Congress, and 13 are Republicans. Ralph Abraham is one of them: He practices family medicine in Louisiana and still sees patients a few times a month when he's not in D.C. His reasons for running in 2014 mirror Tran's: He wanted to fight for poor patients who were being priced out of healthcare. But unlike Tran, he blames the ACA for their woes. "You can put those patients in a box and say, yeah, they've got insurance, but when it comes to pulling money out of their pocket, they can't," says Abraham.

Abraham ran for Congress at least partly to oppose the ACA, and he voted to repeal it earlier this month. He puts little stock on what he calls "speculative" estimates from the Congressional Budget Office that 24 million Americans—and poor, old, or sick ones, in particular—would lose their insurance under the AHCA. "I'll be the first to admit that our Republican plan is not perfect and I hope we can modify it so it's better," he says. "But what we have now is not working."

Tran clearly disagrees. She feels that her physician peers in Congress are more interested in voting down the party line than in voting for their patients. She's not alone in thinking that. Several other physicians have recently felt compelled to enter the world of politics, especially after the recent attempts to repeal Obamacare.

"This is personal for me," says Jason Westin, an oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center who is running for the 7th seat in Texas. "All of my patients have pre-existing conditions and I can't do anything in my current role to fight back for them. I've had a lot of patients who have problems with insurance. They're doing well in clinical trials of life-saving drugs, but their access is now threatened. This isn't a political football. This is going to hurt real people." And he is perplexed by the Republican physicians who have voted for the AHCA. "The Hippocratic oath I took said: First, do no harm," he says. "How could someone else who took that same oath look at the same bill and support it? I don't know."

Westin remembers a moment after the election when he saw his 5-year-old daughter fall down during a soccer game. "I went over and saw that she was fine, so I told her that we don't fix our problems by complaining. We get back in the game. That night, I was venting on Facebook and realized that I'm a hypocrite. So I looked for ways to get in the game." He realized that Hillary Clinton narrowly won his district in the 2016 election, even though Mitt Romney had easily carried the seat four year before. "It's a highly educated area, with a major medical center. It's ripe for someone with a background in science and medicine to speak on political issues with authority."

"If we make our healthcare system better, we need to focus on quality, access, and affordability—and I think the AHCA fails on all three areas," says Ryan Allen, an emergency physician based in Austin, who is considering a run in Texas's 21st district. If he does, he will go up against Lamar Smith, Chair of the House Science Committee, whose attitude towards scientific evidence is also motivating Allen's interest in politics. "He has lately made a career of obstructing scientific exploration and the use of scientific data. I feel that threatens my kid's future, and I think one of the things that's missing from Congress is that ability to interpret data and turn it into public policy." (None of the congressmen whose seats are being challenged returned requests for comment.)