East Anchorage Book Club with Andrew Gray

Tom Pittman is the new Executive Director of Identity Inc. which was established in 1977 as the Alaskan Gay Community Center. Over the years, Identity has had different roles and purposes within the Alaska LGBTQIA2S+ community but has always sought to provide a safe haven for the queer community. In 2021, Identity merged with Full Spectrum Health and became Identity Health Clinic.

Tom Pittman has a master’s in health administration from the University of Washington, and has supported his tribe, the Tlingits, by working for the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC). He worked as an administrator for Fairbanks Memorial Hospital throughout the covid pandemic and its aftermath. He began his tenure as executive director of Identity in January 2024.

Visit Identity's website here.

Maija Katak Lukin served as Mayor of Kotzebue in 2015 when President Barack Obama visited. She later became superintendent of the National Park Service’s Western Arctic National Parklands. She is now the Native Relations Program Manager for the National Park’s Service’s Region 11 which encompasses Alaska.  We discuss her early life, her commitment to the Inupiaq language, climate change's tangible impacts on the Arctic and more.

Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal is the author of the 2017 book, An American Sickness: how healthcare became big business and how you can take it back. The Washington Post describes the book as: “An authoritative account of the distorted financial incentives that drive medical care in the United States . . . Every lawmaker and administration official should pick up a copy of [it].”

Dr. Rosenthal was for 22 years a reporter, correspondent, and senior writer for The New York Times before becoming the editor in chief of Kaiser Health News, an independent journalism newsroom focusing on health and health policy. She holds an MD from Harvard Medical School, trained in internal medicine, and has worked as an ER physician. For over a decade she has been responsible for a popular segment on National Public Radio called, “the Medical Bill of the Month.”

Click here for, "Where the frauds are legal: welcome to the weird world of medical billing," by Elisabeth Rosenthal from The New York Times, Dec. 7, 2019.

Ron Hoffman is the lead pastor of Mountain City Church, formerly known as the Anchorage Baptist Temple. Anchorage Baptist was founded in 1956 by Pastor Don White under the name Baptist Bible Church. The church by whatever name has been a launching pad for conservative Republican politicians in Alaska for decades, and with its 2500 members, it maintains its political influence today. Ron Hoffman’s first contact with the church was in 1984 when he enrolled as a high school freshman at its associated school Anchorage Christian School, now known as Mountain City Christian Academy. After earning his bachelor’s degree from Liberty University in 1991, Ron returned to Anchorage with his wife Crystal and worked in the church’s youth ministry for the next 25 years and raised three children. In 2019, Jerry Prevo retired after 47 years as the head of the church; in May of that year, Ron became lead pastor at Mountain City Church.

Watch Pastor Ron's testimony about his early life here.

Watch Anchorage Police Department Critical Incident, Aug. 13, 2024, here.

Writer Tom Kizzia's eight-part series on the first white settler girl born in American Alaska concludes today in the Anchorage Daily News. “Josie’s Story" tells the story of the life of Josie Rudolph who was born in Sitka in 1869 to German Jewish parents but moved back to Germany when she was still a child. 69 years later in Nuremberg, it was Josie’s Alaskan birth that saved her from the Nazis.

Tom Kizzia had a 25-year career as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. He is the author of three books Cold Mountain Path,  Pilgrim’s Wilderness,  The Wake of the Unseen Object. 

This is Tom Kizzia’s third appearance on this podcast, please check out the links below to listen to his previous appearances:

Tom Kizzia: author on ghost town McCarthy

Tom Kizzia: author of "Wake of the Unseen Object"

Today our guest is former Lieutenant Governor Fran Ulmer. She moved from Wisconsin to Alaska over 50 years ago and has spent much of that time in public service at the local, state, and national levels. She is the former chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, appointed by President Obama in March 2011 and serves on the National Parks Conservation Association Board and chairs the Global Board of the Nature Conservancy. In June 2010, President Obama appointed her to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. From 2007 to 2011, Ms. Ulmer was chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA). Fran served as an elected official for 18 years as the mayor of Juneau, as a state representative, and as Lieutenant Governor of Alaska with Governor Tony Knowles. 

This is the first of three planned interviews. Today we will be focusing on her early life and her work in Governor Jay Hammond’s administration.

Jenny Fayette is the immediate past president of the Alaska Academy of Physician Assistants. She is a graduate of the only physician assistant training program in Alaska, the MEDEX program which is a partnership with the University of Washington and the University of Alaska Anchorage. Prior to going to PA school, Jenny was an exercise physiologist, a high school science teacher, and a professional cross-country skier. After a decade working in orthopedic surgery, she recently took a job as PA in breast surgery. 

We will be discussing a bill from the most recent legislative session that would have modernized the treatment of PAs in Alaska statute. Senate Bill 115 was sponsored by Senator Löki Tobin who represents downtown Anchorage; her bill never made it to the floor of the Alaska State House for a vote, and therefore it died at the end of the 33rd legislature. A new version of that bill will likely be introduced in the 34th Legislature. 

Lisa Aquino is the CEO of the Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center (ANHC). Before taking over that organization in 2021, she was the Executive Director of Catholic Social Services for seven years. She has a Masters in Health Sciences degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center is a federally qualified health center that provides primary health care services to everyone in our community with a special focus on those who face extra barriers to care.  

• Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center is accepting new patients for primary care services
• and has behavioral health services available to all its established patients. 

To learn more or establish care visit ANHC.org or call 907-743-7200.

Dr. Bill Sage is the Assistant Vice President of the Texas A&M Health Science Center, a professor of Medicine at the Texas A& M University School of Medicine, and a professor of Law at Texas A& M University School of Law. He has published hundreds of papers over the decades on health law and policy, and he has edited four books including the Oxford Handbook of US Health Law. He has previously been a professor of law and/or medicine at the University of Texas Austin, Columbia Law School, Yale, Harvard and NYU. Although we will be talking about American health care policy rather than specifically Alaska health care policy, our conversation is relevant since the Alaska Health Care system is a microcosm of our national health care system.

Here are links to many of the Dr. Sage's papers discussed during today's episode:

 "What the Pandemic Taught Us: The Health Care System We Have Is Not the System We Hoped We Had"

"Minding Ps and Qs: The Political and Policy Questions Framing Health Care Spending"

"Brand New Law! The Need to Market Health Care Reform"

Retired Alaska Superior Court Judge Elaine Andrews moved to Alaska in 1976 immediately upon graduating from law school. Her first job as a lawyer was with the Alaska Judicial Council, which is tasked with vetting new judges and with deciding whether or not to recommend sitting judges for retention. In Alaska, a judge must be at least 30 years old, and Elaine Andrews applied and was appointed to the bench shortly after she turned 30. She served as a full-time district court judge for 22 years and continued as a pro tempore judge part-time for another two decades after that.