Anchorage First Presbyterian Rev. Matt Schultz has been present at many people’s moment of death, and he says that all too often, people spend that time filled with guilt and grief about the medical debt they’ll leave behind to their families or wish they had only been able to see a doctor earlier.
At a roundtable hosted by Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates Alaska, he said he worries that the cuts and reductions to Medicaid that Congressional Republicans are pushing as part of Trump’s tax bill will only make those stories more common.
It’s the latest and most serious attack yet by the GOP to gut the social safety net program that supports about one-third of all Alaskans. Rev. Schultz said opposing the cuts is easy when the impact on the state’s neediest and most vulnerable citizens is so dire.
“I think we would all be in tears right now, if not for the fact that this has become an absurd act of repetition for all of us to time and time and time again, be forced to turn up at our congressional delegations offices and beg them not to kill their own constituents,” he said. “Over and over and over again, begging for the life of my congregation members, my neighbors, my children, to say, please don’t yank away the thing that’s keeping them alive.”
The message comes as the U.S. Congress and President Donald Trump push forward with cuts and other restrictions to Medicaid as part of a sweeping redistribution of wealth centered on tax cuts predominantly benefiting the wealthy. Freshman Alaska Rep. Nick Begich has already voted in favor of the measure, but advocates are hoping that U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan will stand up for the state’s neediest.
Cuts to Medicaid are expected to have far-reaching impacts on Alaskans, about a third of whom rely on Medicaid for health coverage. Estimates of the effects vary by proposal, but some estimates are that 40,000 Alaskans could lose coverage. The program also covers more than a third of all births in Alaska, and legislators recently approved changes to extend post-partum coverage for mothers.
But the impacts would be felt particularly hard by Planned Parenthood, said Ada Goodman, the Health Center Manager for the Anchorage Planned Parenthood. The bill is not only expected to kick people off Medicaid, but it would also explicitly bar Medicaid from being used at Planned Parenthood clinics – even though federal funding is already barred from paying for abortions. Goodman said it would mean a loss of all the other care that the clinics provide, such as screenings for cancer and STI treatment.
“Our state’s health care system simply cannot handle the loss of Medicaid, nor the loss of the health care Planned Parenthood provides. Make no mistake, patients will go untreated, and cancers will go undiagnosed. Diagnosis will be missed. People will suffer and die,” she said. “Ask yourself, would you tolerate this for a loved one? Would you be okay to have someone you know needlessly die because they had to make the tough decision to have a suspicious lump checked or to put food on their table? No, you’re not okay with that. Then why is it okay to place that burden on others?”
Planned Parenthood often provides care that may not be available through other clinics or doctors’ offices. And if they are, it may come with waits or other barriers – including a doctor’s personal belief – that make getting critical care an uphill struggle with potentially fatal implications.
That’s the case for Bri Campbell, who spoke at the event, detailing her experience going through pregnancy complications that resulted in the need to abort an unviable fetus. In one case, she said that a doctor told her the procedure needed to wait to see if it developed a heartbeat. She said waiting could have been deadly.
“They insisted we wait … it was horrible,” she said. “I knew I needed that surgery, and the provider decided no, we were going to wait, so I had to spend days with a dead fetus inside me, knowing that there was nothing I could do. I was mad because I was forced to carry the fetus longer than necessary, and now I’m mad because I realized that provider put their personal beliefs ahead of my health and safety.”
For Planned Parenthood, that kind of immediate, low-barrier and supportive care is part of their mission, but it’s also not exactly cheap to provide. Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates Alaska State Director Rose O’Hara-Jolley said that margins can be so slim at clinics that the loss of the Medicaid population, which accounts for about a third of Planned Parenthood patients, would likely lead to the closure of the clinics.
They stressed that this will lead to a loss for everyone, making critical coverage unaffordable for all but those able to afford travel for care.
“Where is your humanity, right?” they said of the cuts. “It’s not necessarily just a loss of a revenue stream for us, it is a loss of access to life-saving care for patients and Alaskans … There is nowhere else for people to go, and if we do not have enough patient base to stay open, then that is a cascading issue to those even with wealth and privilege. If we are the only providers of those services, then you will need to leave the state to get some of those services. It creates a barrier to care for all, except the extremely, extremely wealthy. And denying care to anyone is not something that should be up for debate.”
The advocates are turning to Sens. Murkowski and Sullivan in hopes that they might recognize the harms and help steer the legislation away from such disastrous cuts. And there’s some hope on that front. Murkowski, who broke with Republicans in 2017 to oppose the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, has long been an outspoken advocate for Medicaid and for Planned Parenthood. However, Sullivan has suggested openness to Medicaid cuts.
The group was armed with plenty of numbers, statistics and personal stories about the importance and complexity of delivering health care in Alaska, but the argument seemed to be best summed up by Rep. Schultz, who said, “How many times do we have to return to our congressional delegation and say, Please give a shit?”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
