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Support for Alaska Public Media on demand comes from alyeska Pipeline Service Company maintaining and operating the 800 mile Trans Alaska Pipeline since 1977. More at alyescapipeline.com.
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How can we spend our money more wisely so that we get better outcomes and can potentially spend a lot less?
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A new program prioritizes preventative health care for Alaskans to cut costs. From Alaska Public Media. This is statewide news on Alaska News nightly for Thursday, April 23rd. Good evening. I'm Casey Grove. Also tonight, the U.S. forest Service seeks public input on a new use plan for the Tongass National Forest.
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It's sort of a zoning document and an overall guidance for a forest.
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Those stories and more tonight on Alaska News Nightly. National Democrats are investing in Alaska's U.S. house race, hoping to unseat Congressman Nick Begich. House Majority PAC is affiliated with Democratic leaders. It announced today it is reserving TV and digital ads in Alaska worth more than $2.4 million. Begich, a Republican, will no doubt buy campaign ads of his own. He has raised $4.3 million for his reelection. His best funded challenger is independent Bill Hill. He's raised almost $800,000. Democrat Matt Schultz has taken in contributions of nearly $600,000 since entering the race last year. The House Majority PAC has not endorsed either of the challengers. Its selection of Alaska among a few dozen battleground districts suggests Democrats believe Begich is vulnerable. Their Republican counterparts are not making the same bet. Congressional Leadership Fund, a PAC affiliated with Speaker Mike Johnson, also announced its nationwide ad reservations today. Alaska is not on its list. Ad reservations aren't firm commitments, but they are an early signal of strategic intent. They also allow political groups to lock in lower rates. Both groups say they'll seek to place more ads as the election nears. Rail megaprojects in Interior and south central Alaska got a symbolic show of support on Wednesday from the Alaska Legislature. Federal officials also announced funds bound for related rail infrastructure at the Matanuska Susitna boroughs. Port Mackenzie Alaska's congressional delegation said in a joint news release that the state will receive $34 million for Port Mackenzie from a U.S. department of Transportation ports grant program. The news release said those funds will go toward constructing a cargo lay down area as well as a rail spur and rail loop, among other improvements. The announcement came just after the Alaska Senate approved a resolution supporting the completion of a pair of unfinished railroad extensions. Lawmakers in the House approved the resolution unanimously last year. One of the two megaprojects would connect Port Mackenzie to the state owned Alaska Railroad Corporation's main line south of Houston. That's a roughly 30 mile rail extension expected to cost $275 million. The other involves about 80 miles of new track to link Eielson Air Force Base to Delta Junction and Fort Greely. That is estimated to cost $1.7 billion. Several state lawmakers spoke in support of the rail extensions Wednesday, saying they'd increase the resiliency of Alaska's freight infrastructure and help out military logistics. Here's tok Republican Senator Mike Kronk Fort
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Greeley is the only military base in Alaska that's not connected by rail. It's a missile defense base. You know, it's crucial to defending our country.
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Hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal funds have already been spent on the two rail extension projects, which are partially built. Senator Forrest Dunbar, an Anchorage Democrat, also voted in favor of the resolution, but not without some hesitation. He says he supports the northern rail extension, but Dunbar says building out Port Mackenzie could spread resources thin for similar infrast like the Port of Alaska. And he says Port Mackenzie is an example of a facility without a clear plan for how to pay for maintaining it.
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And this would be another one of those kind of boondoggles unless someone can show me real evidence that this would be self sustaining. It's worth hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and it would not harm our existing port infrastructure.
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The resolution received letters of support from several municipalities in the Matsu and Interior Big Lake. Republican Representative Kevin McCabe sponsored the resolution in the House. In a statement after the Senate vote, McCabe said the resolution sends a message to Washington and investors that Alaska is ready. Well, many states in the US Are formalizing health care models that prioritize preventative health care as a way to make people healthier and save money. But Alaska has been slow to follow suit. As Alaska Public Media's Rachel Cassandra reports, the influx of money to the state through the Rural Health Transformation Program might just change that.
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Bill Mendenhall sits in an armchair at his house in Anchorage and straps a blood pressure cuff on his arm.
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Lately it's been all over the place.
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Mendenhall's working with his primary care doctor,
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so that's a little high to bring
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down his blood pressure.
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It's insidious of what high blood pressure can do to your kidneys and so forth.
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People can lower blood pressure through diet or medication, but if they don't, it can lead to serious health problems.
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We call it sort of the silent killer because you don't really feel it.
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It's Just one example of how steps early on to address health concerns can prevent larger problems down the line. Preventative health care like that is one focus of the new program that Mendenhall is a part of. He's on Medicare federal health insurance that mostly serves people age 65 and up. And the program is retooling how some Alaska healthcare providers work with Medicare patients. It's called Envoy Integrated Health. It's a coalition of different types of providers in Anchorage and Mat Su that includes multiple clinics. The program's headed by cardiologist Dr. Jean Quinn. He says typically, the way the healthcare system in the US Works is what's called a fee for service model.
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If I do a procedure X, I get paid. Y patient does well, I get paid. Y patient does poorly, I get paid. Why? It doesn't matter about the quality or the outcome of what I do. I still get paid just for doing it.
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Instead, he says, their model turns that on its head. And providers get paid for how healthy their patients are, not how many times they have an appointment or procedure. It's one type of what's called a value based care model. Envoy worked with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to set up a program similar to those already in place in many other states. Basically, the centers set a benchmark for how much the entire group of Medicare patients should cost per year.
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And if you maintain their good care, but also do it in a way that saves costs to the system, then you get to split part of that savings.
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It's a way to financially incentivize efficient, effective care. That's especially important in Alaska. The state has some of the highest health care costs in the world. And the Envoy program has saved the system a lot of money. More than $7 million on around 6,000 patients over the first year. It's just one model of value based care, and Alaskans may start seeing more. That's because the state is getting over a billion dollars over the next few years from the federal government through the Rural Health Transformation Program. The program prioritizes several goals for healthcare in the state, including value based care. Ann Zink is former head physician for the state. She says on a population level, the premise of value based care is simple.
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How am I paying for the things
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that are actually going to create the best outcomes?
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She says typically, rural healthcare costs are higher and the health outcomes are worse than in urban areas.
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So that's part of the reason why the Rural Health Transformation is saying, how
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can we spend our money more wisely
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so that we get better outcomes? And can potentially spend a lot less.
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She says it incentivizes healthcare systems to look beyond just sick care to wider impacts on health, like access to nutritious food.
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Some insurance companies have built grocery stores in community because then the grocery store can help provide healthier foods, she says.
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That saved insurance dollars. And in another example, she says, a county reduced emergency room visits for kids with asthma by working with the housing authority to get rid of mold and pests. Envoy has also started focusing on those wider influences on health, Dr. Quinn says. They started a system to connect their patients to social services, like a food bank or organizations that help people find stable housing, he says value based care is good for both patients and healthcare providers.
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Physicians want to take good care of patients. They don't want to worry about finances. They don't want to think is this patient Medicare or Medicaid or commercial pay and can I afford to see them? Value based care really flips that and
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he says it's a win win. Value based care can prevent provider burnout and make for healthier, happier communities. In Anchorage, I'm Rachel Cassandra.
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Still to come on Alaska News Nightly, a teenager thought to be UAA's youngest ever graduate says it's not all about her.
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Every single person here has had a different path, has gone through a different stage of life, and we've all made it to this moment together.
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That's ahead. Stay with us. Two people are dead after a fire engulfed a home in Bethel's Trailer Court neighborhood Monday, according to a press release from the Bethel Police Department. Police and fire department personnel who responded at around 4:30pm were unable to enter the residence due to extreme heat, heavy smoke and active flames. After the fire was extinguished. First responders found two people deceased inside Bethel. Police say their names will be publicly released once they're identified and their next of kin have been notified. The state fire marshal's office will be conducting an investigation into the fire department. A week after a Ward Air plane crashed and sank into Favorite Channel near Juneau, officials are still piecing together what happened. Last Thursday morning. A pilot reported a loss of engine power while flying from Haines to Juneau and then crashed into Favorite Channel near Boy scout Beach. The U.S. coast Guard issued an urgent marine information broadcast and launched a boat and helicopter response. The crash involved a Cessna single engine propeller plane. At the time of the incident, the pilot was the only passenger and there was no cargo on board. The pilot was rescued from the downed aircraft in the water by another company plane, according to Alaska State Troopers. The pilot suffered minor injuries and hypothermia and was transported to a hospital. Clint Johnson with the National Transportation Safety Board says an investigation into the incident is still ongoing. He says it will be hard to pinpoint the exact cause without investigating the wreckage itself. The plane is still at the bottom of the channel, and it's unclear if it can be recovered without being able
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to lay hands on the airplane and be able to prove exactly what caused the engine failure. We're a bit of a loss at this point, but again, keep in mind there's always a chance that we might be able to recover it, but I think it's highly unlikely at this point right now.
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The pilot and the plane were from Ward Air, a private charter service in Juneau. Ward Air did not identify the pilot or provide a comment immediately following the incident and again in a later inquiry. The U.S. forest Service is rethinking how it defines areas of the Tongass National Forest and wants the public to weigh in. One of the ideas is to designate recreation areas according to the amount of commercial recreation and, as KTO's Alex Solomon reports, that might direct where and how the Forest Service issues permits for tourism operators.
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The Forest Service is seeking public comment on a draft outline for its Tongass Forest Plan revision. In it, the agency proposes two types of recreation high commercial use and low commercial use. The idea could guide the Forest Service on where to concentrate high traffic tourism, but it's still just an idea. Barb Miranda is the deputy forest supervisor for the Tongass. She explained the idea to about 40 Juneau residents at a public meeting the agency recently held at its Juneau District office.
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Think of it as sort of a zoning document from a city, but it's sort of a zoning document and an overall guidance for a forest.
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This is part of the agency's revision process for the Tongass Forest Management Plan. The plan sets the Forest Service's overarching vision and goals for things like logging, subsistence, ecosystem health and recreation. The current plan, made a decade ago, doesn't map high and low commercial recreation use areas, but it does classify recreation areas on a spectrum from urban to what the agency calls primitive. That spectrum guides where roads, motorized vehicles and amenities go. Miranda says the agency wants to simplify how the plan organizes different parts of the forest, going from more than a dozen land use designations in the current plan to just a handful of management areas with some special guidelines. And Miranda says the proposed recreation areas intend to address the growth of tourism in the Tongass.
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The biggest employer is tourism and the biggest impact to communities and how we develop communities is tourism.
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Alex Pierce is the visitor industry director for the city and Borough of Juneau, which is expecting 1.7 million cruise ship passengers this year. She says looking at recreation and tourism based on levels of intensity is a valuable exercise and could offer more clarity than the current plan.
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There will probably be some evolution in
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the way that they look at the
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zones, but I do think that the zoning concept is a good idea, she says.
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It could help protect areas that residents don't want to see overrun by commercial tourism and could allow for development in areas where tourism is central. But Pierce says the plan should be adaptive since some small Southeast communities want to expand tourism to boost local economies, like the village of Klawack on Prince of Wales Island. Don Nickerson is mayor of Klawack and president of Klawaak Heena Corporation. He says the village of around 700 people welcomed six cruise ships in 2024, the first year its cruise port opened. This summer, he says he's expecting 58 cruise ships.
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I think access, you know, to nature tourism and ecotourism is going to be huge. You know, from what I see with a lot of the guests that come into our port, you know, they're very interested in wildlife and natural beauty.
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So he says it's important for Forest Service land accessible from Kluoc to allow high recreation use in places where visitors can count on seeing bears, eagles and salmon. Miranda says that while the Forest Service doesn't control the number of cruises coming to Southeast, the agency does issue permits to commercial operators who guide on the Tongass. She says high commercial recreation areas around towns with cruise ship ports like the Menenhall Glacier Recreation Area in Juneau would continue to support many commercial tourism permits.
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On the other hand, low commercial recreation use areas are places where locals might say, we wish you wouldn't put as many special use permit holders into those areas. Maybe that's just the place for the locals to know that they're not going to be overrun by commercial the current
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comment period for the draft outline closes May 6. Miranda says the agency wants feedback from Southeast residents.
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What are the places you don't want to see commercial tourism like? If there's places like that, then let's hear from you. What are those?
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In addition to commenting on recreation, Miranda says it's a chance for locals to weigh in on the other proposed management areas, including old growth forests, key fisheries, watersheds and community use areas. Miranda says the Forest Service plans to release a full draft of the plan at the end of the year, which will kick off another comment Period. In Juneau, I'm Alex Solomon.
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Residents of St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands have a new commercial air carrier. Aleutian Airways flew Its first scheduled Saab 2000 flight to St. Paul on Monday. The Bering Sea community lost its only regular air service to Anchorage last summer and has relied on expensive charter flights ever since. Now, after months of delays and uncertainty, residents can finally book a regular commercial flight again.
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I'm not exaggerating when I say it's life changing. It really is life changing.
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John Wayne Melavedoff is the president of St. Paul's tribal government, the Aleut community of St. Paul Island. The tribe has been working along with the city and village corporation for months to restore affordable service. Melovedov says the community pushed hard to find a solution to what many residents saw as the island's biggest issue have
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access to get on and off island and to get to their appointments or to get to their business meetings or just even have a vacation. This is huge.
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Aleutian Airways won its bid with the federal Essential Air Service program, which subsidizes flights in places where commercial service is not viable. The EAS contract also includes the western Alaska communities of Unilocleet and St. Mary's where complications led to a similar situation as St. Paul. Inclement weather and a required certification to fly over water make it particularly difficult for commercial airlines to fly to St. Paul. Aleutian Airways originally planned to begin service at the beginning of the year, but had to push its launch back several months to obtain over water certification.
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Once they were able to get things kind of ironed out, they were able to have their first flight just this last, just on Monday. And I happened to be flying out that day, so I got to fly out on this OB 2000 and it's great. It's great for the community for our membership to be able to have access to the rest of the world, to America is great.
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One way flights to anchorage cost around $400, the cheapest price St. Paul has seen in at least a decade. When the University of Alaska Anchorage holds its commencement ceremony next month, it will celebrate a young woman who is likely its youngest ever gradu at 17 years old, Rainey Spurlock holds that distinction going back at least to 1997. A university spokesperson says they don't have access to records before that. Spurlock, who hails from Palmer, is no stranger to the spotlight. She's worked as a child actor and produces music under the name Rainie Lane. She's also set to deliver UAA's undergraduate commencement speech, May 3. Despite her accomplishments, Spurlock says it's not all about her.
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I really had to figure out a balance. I don't want it to be all about me. Like, I don't want to talk about how cool this accomplishment is, because I don't want people to look at that and say, oh, well, now I don't feel as good about my accomplishment, which I think people too often do. And so when I was thinking about that was, I want to incorporate that in my speech. Like, not comparing your path to other people's. And so my introduction is just kind of talking about my grandma and I's journeying and then kind of giving it back to the audience. Like, every single person here has had a different path, has gone through a different stage of life, and we've all made it to this moment together. Like, we've all accomplished something that took so much bravery and effort and being comfortable failing and being comfortable learning. And it takes a lot of bravery to learn because you have to be comfortable not immediately understanding a concept. And that is actually really hard for a lot of people. And so it's really impressive, I think, to have graduated.
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I mean, obviously it's different that you're 17, you're about to graduate from college. When I was your age, I was just, like, barely trying to make it out of high school. How were you able to accomplish that? How were you able to get through high school and now college so quickly? And then also, why. I mean, why would you want to? Are there things about that that you just wanted to get through it quicker? But I guess starting just with how did you do that?
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So it's actually pretty interesting. So I started going to college when I was 13. I couldn't enroll in the middle college because you have to be 16 to go to middle college, and you have to be at least either in the middle college or 18 to be on the college campus, unless you're with your legal guardian. And so I went and so far have gone to every single class with my grandma, except for, like, a handful of online classes. So she has taken the classes with me and been in the class alongside me so that I would be able to be there legally. So I graduated at 15 from my high school, and now I'm graduating at 17 from college. And it's all because of my awesome grandma being able to go with me and support me. But why do I do it now? That's really funny you ask. Because I have, like, a whole plethora of reasons. But the main One is that I want freedom. Like, I feel like everyone has a core value, and mine is freedom. And that applies, like, financially or just being able to do what I want. And I feel like there's a freedom to also having an education and being educated. I also like to know what I'm talking about. I want to be an educated person.
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Well, so tell me about your music. How would you describe it and what do you like about making music?
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I've made about, I think, 10 songs so far. 10 singles that are all really amazing. And I think the way to encapsulate them is they're all very different. But I basically am trying to capture what it's like to be a teenager. Like, it's okay to be, you know, to be angry and it's okay to be happy and it's okay to be sad. And I'm trying to capture all these, like, kind of complex situations. One of my songs, Plato's Daughter, is about my boyfriend. His mom passed away. And it's about how when someone you love has something horrible happen to them, there's nothing you can do to fix it. You can't say anything that's gonna fix it. There's nothing to do. It's like this horrible feeling of like, you love someone and you want to help them, but there's no way to. You can't fix the problem, you know? And then Gemini, which is my song that's about to come out May 3, is about. It's about the feeling of absolutely hating someone. But you can't say that you hate them because they're friends with all of your friends. Right. So it's kind of this mix of, like, I'm trying to capture these kind of specific scenarios that could still apply. Like, I want my music to really, like, connect with people. I want them to be like, wow, that's actually really relatable. And I think too often that people kind of sugarcoat how they feel, and I don't want to be like that, you know?
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Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I should ask too. I mean, what has your experience been, like, going to the University of Alaska Anchorage, and especially, you know, finishing up now, probably these higher level classes that you're doing.
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It's been awesome. I mean, in my first couple years, I was going to like, mat su to take a lot of my classes because it's closer to home. So a lot of the students there are teenagers. Like me, like 16. I mean, I was 13, right. But it was still like, oh, they're like 16, 17. That's pretty close to my age. But as I got into my 300 and 400 level classes, it was all adults, which was different for me. I had to be comfortable communicating with adults and saying, hey, this is my opinion, and having open conversations. I think my grandma helped me a lot with that, feeling confident. And now in my master's program, I had friend of a friend say, oh, is it hard for you? Like, do they discredit you? Or maybe not have you do as much of, like, group projects because they underestimate you a little bit? And I was like, no, quite the opposite. I do all the work in the group projects for these 30 and 40 year olds. And they're like, oh, we're gonna have Rainy make the PowerPoint presentation. We're gonna have Rainy help us write the document. Because I don't try to prove myself. That's just kind of how I am. Like, I really want. I like things to get done. But it has been weird. Like, I have not had the typical college experience. I mean, I don't have college friends because that would be weird, right? I said to my person in the class I'm taking that we're kind of friends. And I was like, hey, we should make plans about something that I could do. And he's like, oh, wait, no, never mind, everybody, let's not go to the bar. Let's go to Chuck E. Cheese. And it's just funny. It could, but it's very. It's different. It's not the typical experience. And I'm okay with that.
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That was Rainey Spurlock, likely the University of Alaska, Anchorage's youngest ever graduate. She'll be giving the undergraduate commencement speech May 3rd. And that's the same day her single titled Gemini is set for release under the name Rainy Lane. You can find more about her music@rainylane music.com. well, that's all for this edition of Alaska News Nightly. We had reports tonight from Liz Ruskin in Washington, D.C. patrick Gilchrist in Fairbanks, Rachel Cassandra in Anchorage, Clarice Larson and Alex Solomon in Juno, and Theo Greenlee in Portland. Our audio engineer is Crystal Hyde. Kirsten Dobroth is our producer. And I'm Casey Grove. Good night. This is statewide news on Alaska Public Media.