Health Care for Every Alaskan

I will work toward guaranteed access to quality health care for everyone in Alaska regardless of where they live or their ability to pay. Expansion of our rural and tribal health systems so preventive, mental health, and acute medical care services are available closer to home for more Alaskans is desperately needed.

I will always support the privacy of the patient-provider relationship and the right to make one’s own health care decisions. Protecting personal bodily autonomy including reproductive rights is core to our first and fourth amendment rights, as well as Alaska’s constitutional privacy guarantee.

As a retired preventive and primary care physician, I am appalled at the quagmire that access to, and payment for, health care has become. Both nationally and within our state, medical care and particularly elder care have become a middleman's profit center at the expense of access and affordability. There's nothing wrong with a business making a reasonable profit for providing a valuable service but I am dismayed at the degree to which people and their health needs can be demeaned to little more than a ledger entry. Health care costs have regularly outpaced overall inflation since before I entered medical school so many years ago. There's nothing reasonable about it.

Worse, with the support of our own federal legislators, we've been dealt a one-two punch. First by the deregulation of corporate insurance and the loss of ACA subsidies, causing insurance to be utterly out of reach for thousands. Next, the full impact of the 2025 Big Ugly Bill hits in just a few months (not coincidentally right AFTER the mid-term elections), by which time as many as 30,000 - 40,000 Alaskans will have lost their health care coverage as well as SNAP benefits.

Some will counter Rural Health Transformation Program dollars will make up for all those cuts. Hardly. They WILL do some good, such as $108K to hire a RHTP Coordinator in Healy, who it is hoped will help replace the clinic that closed in 2025. But the RHTP is a piecemeal program with substantial limitations on what dollars may and may not be used for and no predictability for what specific local projects will get funded. It is basically a porkbarrel program; great when you get the dollars and not so great if you don't. Make no mistake; RHTP is in NO way a fix to a fundamentally broken health care system.

The health care system is collapsing before our eyes. Until there is reform at the national level, it will be the difficult task of our state to protect our fellow residents as best we can. There will come a day when America joins the dozens of other nations where health care is universally available, well managed, consumes less of the GDP, and for which nobody goes bankrupt. I’ll do everything I can for Alaska to lead the way.