2025 Advocacy Priorities to Advance Health, Well-Being, and Equity
Improve Social Determinants of Health
Unmet nonmedical needs—including healthy food, stable housing, and access to transportation—have a more significant impact on an individual’s health than the hospital and clinical care they receive. As noted in the 2022 and 2019 Mat-Su Community Health Needs Assessments, health starts where we live, learn, work, play, and pray. The social fabric and community conditions (i.e., affordable housing, quality education, reliable transportation, and a thriving environment) contribute significantly to one’s overall well-being. We support policy and regulation change that achieve the following:
- All Mat-Su residents have equitable opportunities to meet their basic needs for food, housing, employment, and transportation. Ensure Mat-Su Borough fully funds local match for health and human services transport.
- Robust investments in early childhood—both Pre-K and childcare—to ensure all families, regardless of income, can access safe, reliable childcare so that they can participate in the workforce. This includes full State funding for Head Start so that Alaska can maximize the full federal match.
- Adequate funding for Special Supplemental Nutrition Program (SNAP).
- Adequate funding for programs serving our most vulnerable residents including older Alaskans, the fastest-growing segment of Mat-Su’s population.
- Support for 1115 waivers authorizing Medicaid funds to address social needs, including food as medicine.
- Policy and funding that increases housing for workforce, families, and special populations.
Support Workforce Development
Building the healthcare workforce of tomorrow requires action today. Over the next ten years, the healthcare industry is expected to add more jobs than any other industry, but we do not have adequate training capacity to put Alaskans in those jobs. Strategies we support include:
- Passage of legislation to allow Alaska to join the 39 states and jurisdictions that are part of the multistate nurse licensure compact.
- Ongoing support for the WWAMI program, a partnership with the University of Washington Medical School that is the single largest contributor of physicians to Alaska’s workforce.
- Ongoing support for the SHARP program, which provides incentives for clinicians to work in Alaska by offering student loan repayment for designated providers in high-need healthcare settings. As a public/ private partnership, this program requires no monetary investment at the State level.
- Investments in data systems to monitor and forecast health workforce needs.
- State investment in Graduate Medical Education to support Mat-Su Teaching Health Center/GME.
Ensure Equitable Access to High-Quality Healthcare
Alaska’s healthcare costs have been and are one of the highest in the nation. Where possible, like with our borough’s largest employer, the Mat-Su Borough School District, employers cost-shift these growing healthcare costs back to employees, causing additional wage stagnation. The fastest growing charity care population at Mat-Su Regional are those insured with high deductible healthcare plans because more businesses are shifting to these to address the rising costs. The proportion of family income going to healthcare increases almost every year, resulting in families delaying care and treatment until illness becomes acute. Healthcare bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in America.
Governments are the largest providers of employer-sponsor health insurance, plus ensure retirees, Medicaid beneficiaries, and special populations like the incarcerated, so they have incentive to engage in health reform efforts and save costs. While Medicaid is a key part of Alaska’s health insurance landscape, serving more than 260,000 Alaskans and 40,000 Mat-Su residents of all ages, the State appropriates less general fund dollars to Medicaid than it did 10 years ago, despite providing healthcare coverage to more Alaskans than ever before.
Access to healthcare is impacted by cost, insurance status, provider availability, transportation, and more. We support strategies that improve equitable access to healthcare and those that can bring down healthcare costs for individuals, families, and businesses (not just for healthcare providers). Strategies we support include:
- Decreasing primary health care expenditure per capita and increasing access to primary care for all populations.
- Health reform efforts that extend health coverage and common basic benefits for all and where whole person/integrated systems of care are supported by appropriate payment mechanisms.
- Applying healthcare cost and quality data to better manage the delivery of healthcare in Alaska.
- Pass legislation to fully implement an All-Payer Claims Database (APCD) and compel payors to submit their data so that Alaska can better assess cost and quality of healthcare services.
- Pass legislation and regulation to interface the APCD and Health Information Exchange (HIE) for improved data utility.
- Create a Community Care Organization (CCO) Model that is funded and sustained to improve health and well-being of every community. Ensure this model supports programs like the High Utilizer Mat-Su (HUMS) and Connect Mat-Su.
- Design a system that incentivizes whole person care and changes how we pay specialists versus behavioral health, etc.
- Reduce the amount consumers and providers spend on administrative burden.
- Strengthening Medicaid services for all eligible Alaskans.
- Continued support for meaningful Medicaid reform to provide upstream intervention and prevention. Adequate reimbursement rates for Medicaid and Medicare providers.
- Adequate funding and availability of Behavioral Health services.
- Support for Department of Health’s initiative to expand Behavioral Health services in schools.