U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan held a town hall meeting in Anchorage Saturday, one of only a few he’s held on road system since the election of President Trump. Hundreds packed into the Bartlett High School auditorium and they were frequently vocal.
This was not the kind of crowd Sullivan was used to.
“I can’t tell if those are boos or if those are — Don’t answer!” Sullivan said at the start. “You don’t have to answer that.”
When he spoke about rolling back federal regulation and turning control over to the states, lines that usually draw applause for him fell flat. Or worse.
“The thrust of what we need to be doing is letting the states, who understand their (insurance) market much better, much better than bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., design a system that fits Alaska,” Sullivan said, straining to continue over the chorus of booing.
Sullivan took questions for over an hour. Many were about proposed changes to the Affordable Care Act.
Health care worker Sarah Stevens asked the senator how he expects Alaskans to bear the cost of giving birth if Congress allows insurers to drop maternity coverage.
Sullivan said he supports covering pregnancies, but flexibility would bring down insurance costs.
”What I don’t support is a federal government plan, like you have under the Affordable Care Act, that says to a 60-year-old male ‘you have to have insurance that covers maternity,'” Sullivan said, amid sustained booing. “It makes no sense, and that’s why you have premiums spiking.”
“But isn’t that just health insurance?” Stevens asked, to hearty applause. “I don’t need prostate exams but I pay into a health care plan that provides prostate exams.”
The booing continued, especially on health care responses, and the crowd held up red cards to show their disagreement. A few people in the crowd started chants of “single-payer.”
“Just to get it out of the system and get the biggest boo of the night, I am not supporting a single-payer health system,” Sullivan said, drawing the predicted response.
Red cards also went up when Sullivan spoke of defunding Planned Parenthood and mentioned Trump’s more controversial cabinet secretaries. Green cards appeared when Sullivan described Russia as an adversary and said Alaska’s climate is changing. (Sullivan, though, has disputed the scientific consensus on the cause of climate change. He voted “no” to a Senate declaration that “human activity contributes to climate change.”)
The crowd chanted “yes or no?” when Sullivan did not give a simple answer to a question about his support for expanded Medicaid. The senator says he’s focused on not pulling the rug out from under current enrollees.
Donna Marie is among the constituents who have been clamoring for months for a congressional town hall in Anchorage. At his request, she introduced Sullivan on the Bartlett stage, and she took it on herself to ask people to be respectful and avoid booing. She says it surprised her how one-sided the audience was.
“I thought the senator would have more conservative support in the crowd, and more support for his views,” Marie said. “But I didn’t see more than three or four of what I would call Trump administration supporters, and the rest of the crowd seemed overwhelmingly progressive.”
Marie said Sullivan responded with “good grace and good humor to a fairly hostile audience.”
“Were they rude? Perhaps a little bit,” Marie said. “But they weren’t out of control. And it’s not like they prevented the meeting from going on. They might have delayed (it) for a couple of moments, but otherwise I thought the audience reacted appropriately given the situation.”
Marie said she’s hoping Sen. Lisa Murkowski or Congressman Don Young will appear at a town hall she’s organizing at the end of the month.
Sullivan, in a written statement Monday, said the Anchorage town hall was more “raucous” than his previous community outreach events. But he said he believes in listening to all Alaskans, regardless of their ideology.
Zachariah Hughes contributed to this story.
Sen. Sullivan answered a question on Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ plans for rural communities, like Alaska’s. (Wesley Early, Alaska Public Media)
An attendee asked about proposed cuts to Planned Parenthood.(Wesley Early, Alaska Public Media)
Another attendee asked Sullivan about whether he will protect Medicaid expansions that occurred under the Affordable Care Act. (Wesley Early, Alaska Public Media)
Liz Ruskin is the Washington, D.C., correspondent at Alaska Public Media. Reach her at lruskin@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Liz here.
