Seventeen candidates are running to be Alaska’s next governor. Alaskans are already heading to the polls for early voting in the Aug. 18 nonpartisan, pick-one primary, which will narrow the field to four.
It can be tough to pick a favorite in a crowded field, so as the primary nears, Alaska Public Media is conducting interviews with some of the top candidates in the race. We reached out to every campaign that’s raised $50,000 or more as of the mid-July deadline to report fundraising, and nearly all responded.
Today, we’ll hear from Republican candidate Matt Heilala, a foot and ankle surgeon and former member of the Alaska State Medical Board.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
So this is your first campaign for elected office, and I’m just very curious what that’s been like. I’m curious what you have learned along the way, and has anything surprised you?
We have been creating a lifetime of memories, I’ll tell you that. I would say it’s been mostly an excellent experience. Alaskans have been very inviting into their lives, into their businesses, into their problems, their aspirations, and it’s been a wonderful experience to travel all around the state, hearing from fellow Alaskans about what they hope for in the future, the problems they’re encountering now, what they want to see in a new governor.
I think the biggest challenges have been being an unknown political figure, a candidate that, kind of that top tier of the political apparatus, they’re not sure what to make of me. The system is kind of set up for promoting candidates that are already a part of the system, in general, which is kind of a surprise to me, because of course we always speak about the need for fresh blood in politics, people that are not bureaucrats. We need people from the private sector to step forward and to offer their passion, their conviction in elected office. But I think the apparatus has a difficult time with that.
So what should they make of you, in your opinion?
Well, it’s a pretty common refrain that when people get elected, we have great aspirations and hope that that candidate will fulfill their promises. They’re going to do things differently. They’re going to help align the Legislature for the benefit of all Alaska. They’re going to get these projects, be it natural resource development, economic priorities or energy projects, underway. And within about a year or two, everything falls into that same pattern of bureaucratic culture, of gridlock and delay. And then they’re like, well, I guess it makes sense, the person was a bureaucrat, they were in government for years. Why did we expect anything different?
And I think that’s what’s surprising to me, that there’s really not a nice, easy pathway to promote someone that’s from the outside, and what I’m saying is from the political apparatus. Around the districts and things, it’s about familiarity. It’s interesting. I think it’s what people say they want, but then what they actually facilitate and execute is sadly the same old conveyor belt of the bureaucrat that’s either been in office or been in government for years, and it ends up becoming like, well, who’s next in line to be the governor? That’s a challenge.
And I guess on that note, how would you use your private sector background, primarily as a foot and ankle surgeon, to be the chief executive of the state with a multibillion-dollar budget and 15,000 employees?
So really, what I’m leveraging now — being a foot and ankle surgeon for all these years has been very helpful. When you go in the operating room, you’re the captain of the ship. You can’t tolerate gridlock and delay. You have to have backup plans, everything, and you’re ultimately responsible. So that’s how that’s somewhat relevant.
Now, really, it’s my business background that I think I will be able to lend and leverage, and it’s about uniting or unifying warring factions. That’s kind of been — well, not kind of, it’s been a big part of what I’ve done for the last 25 to 30 years in different business operations, not only in healthcare but different startup companies I’ve been involved with, patent acquisitions, property development, commercial real estate, etc. And it’s really the business background. I did get an MBA a little bit late in life, at 50, just to kind of smooth out the rough edges of what I had been implementing or working with all these years in business. And coming together in person, getting these people to agree, close the door, we’re not leaving until we can flesh out agreement, these are the kinds of things that are a norm in business, and they’re not a norm in government. So that’s what I have to offer there.
So that’s a lot of the how. And now I’m also curious about, sort of, the what. Let’s talk a little bit about your platform.
One of the biggest issues the next governor is going to face is energy: a looming shortage of natural gas from Cook Inlet, high energy prices in places across the state. I’m curious how you would approach that problem.
Right. So energy, we’ll jump right in, the local anticipated shortage of natural gas right here in Southcentral. If you look at it as a problem to be solved, you need to get the decision makers, the stakeholders that are involved in the exploration and production of natural gas for our area, in a room together. As a governor, I would be present. I have to be the one as a big facilitator of this conversation.
You get Enstar involved. You get Hilcorp. You get HEX. And you discuss their trepidation about making that big investment to go out and explore and find that gas. We know that it’s there. It’s an issue of that capital expenditure, and they know very well that if they put out whatever it be, $100 million to go and explore, go find the pockets of gas we need, that within a few years, three to five, they’re staring down the barrel of an Alaska LNG line coming from the North Slope down here that could vaporize their business. So they’re very concerned about an outlay of capital, effort and bandwidth on this project, with the uncertainty of where they’re going to be standing five to seven years later.
So I think that you have to get creative, but you do need to be present in that room with the producers, with the explorers, with the stakeholders, Enstar, etc., and say, “Hey, guys, we have a responsibility to Southcentral Alaska to get gas. A cold winter is going to be a dismal thing if we don’t have gas, and we aren’t leaving this room until we come up with some kind of a deal that’s mostly fleshed out.” So it’s very doable. The last thing you want to do, though, is alienate one of your primary producers with saber rattling about changing a tax structure they’ve been relying on for the last, oh, five, eight years or more, that S-corp, C-corp question, right when you’re trying to get them to be your partner in solving this natural gas supply issue.
Yeah. So you’re talking about the pass-through entities tax, sometimes called the S corp tax, that would expand Alaska’s corporate income tax structure to capture revenue from pass-through entities. (It’s) estimated to raise about $100 million a year. A lot of that would come from major producer Hilcorp, and that has been a big debate over the past year. Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the Legislature have found themselves at odds over a proposal to offer tax relief to the Alaska LNG project over exactly that issue.
So I’m curious, if you were in Gov. Dunleavy’s shoes right now, how would you approach the problem? It sounds like you would not have signed the bill that the Senate came out with that did include that S corp tax. But this issue might fall to your governorship. How would you solve this problem?
So you’re right, I would not have signed that bill. I think it’s the wrong time. I think it’s confusing the property tax issue that was the original intent to get this AK LNG line going. I think that’s critical to get this thing going. We need a secure, abundant and eventually cheap source of energy, which is the AK LNG line.
And from speaking with people that have a lot of inside information about that S corp, C corp, pass-through entity issue, it was kind of a special deal that Hilcorp came upon when they came up here. It was a part of why they came up here, to revitalize some of these old fields. And it is something that you can use as a negotiating point to try to incentivize them to produce much-needed gas here in Southcentral. So you can get creative with that.
They do understand that that loophole in the tax arrangement is likely to go away at some point. That’s what I was advised by one of the main tax representatives here in the state — back when they entered the market, that they understood it probably wouldn’t be forever. And I think it’s fair and probably realistic that this individual told me that.
I think that you don’t want to be threatening with them, but I think that might be something that you could incentivize. Say, hey, maybe we won’t talk about this for a few more years if you go out and take risk for us out in Cook Inlet and find gas for us right now and make that capital investment. I think there’s a lot of ways to skin that cat, but you’ve got to get in a room, you’ve got to be creative, you’ve got to approach them as your partner in business. That’s the big thing. Not an adversary.
I want to talk about some of the other top issues facing the state. You’ve talked about adequately funding schools while also encouraging school choice options like charter school or homeschool. You’ve also talked about paying the biggest Permanent Fund dividend the state can afford. I believe these are topics we’ve covered in past interviews.
But all of that, of course, takes money. The state has faced a large deficit for years. The state just simply spends more than it takes in, and you have talked about increasing transparency in government spending to increase trust in government to hopefully help solve that problem.
But I’m curious, sort of mechanically, how you would actually balance the budget. Like, where the money to pay a dividend, to adequately fund schools, where does that money come from?
Well, it ultimately comes from the private sector, and we need to go full steam ahead with AK LNG, getting more oil in the (pipe)line.
So I was down at the Alaska Superintendents Association conference down in Juneau just a few days ago, and funding of schools was top of mind. That was probably 80% of the conversation there, was the proper funding of schools, the retention of teachers, etc. And it’s all economics.
When I was a kid graduating high school in Soldotna, my wife and I, in 1988, we had over 2 million barrels of oil in that pipeline. No one would have ever imagined that all these years later we would be less than a fifth of that. I think maybe we’re just over a fifth now, at over 400,000 barrels, with new oil with Pikka.
But that is the number one prerogative, is to get more oil in that pipeline right now. Imagine if we had even 1 million barrels of oil while oil went up to $110, $120 per barrel, where we would be right now. So a lot of things get solved very rapidly if you get more oil in that pipeline.
Bill Armstrong stated about four or five months ago that he is quite certain that there are two additional Prudhoe Bays of oil on the North Slope. He is currently discovering many of them from the NPR-A west, and he basically pointed out and convened a meeting about building a road east and west of Deadhorse to get that oil more rapidly in the pipeline.
He said if you put $1 billion to $1.5 billion, and there are people vying in the private sector to be a part of that, into roads, you could get more revenue to the state more rapidly, just through those new oil finds, than the entire AK LNG project combined. So he said everyone’s excited about AK LNG as a secure, abundant source of energy, and that’s critically important, but don’t lose sight of your vast oil reservoirs that are now being discovered and proven, and getting them in the line to solve a lot of these problems.
So to answer your question, number one, that’s what we have to do: press forward with natural resource development and energy project development. That would be hydro, all these things to get abundant cheap energy, because that’s the fertile soil for the seeds of industry. Industry knocks on your door if you have an abundant, secure source of energy. It’s not always dirt cheap at first. It generally becomes cheaper as you have more customers. But that is critical.
The Permanent Fund, that’s going to be a sticky issue. There’s no easy answer there while we’re in these lean times. This next five to seven years, probably at a minimum, it’s going to be a battle where our people’s Legislature are going to duke it out each year about how much they think we can afford. I am respectful of that.
A full statutory PFD, I am not advocating for that right now, because it would drain down our reserve account to zero and we would be paralyzed as a state. It is irresponsible. We do need to get spending under control. So the top line and bottom line need to be dealt with.
So with a fiscal transparency situation, which we’ve really not done. It’s about that vision of prosperity. That’s the primary vision of my administration. That’s how we’re going to secure an economically solvent future for the next generation to call Alaska home, because right now it’s not affordable, pay is not enough, and we’re losing young people.
I wanted to dig a little deeper on what you’re saying as far as getting more oil in the pipeline being a way to alleviate the state’s budget issues. When I hear that, I think of the fact that Pikka was discovered more than a decade ago and it just recently produced first oil. They took, I believe, (final investment decision) on it in the early 2020s, I think 2022, and again it just started producing first oil.
So this is not necessarily something that can happen quickly. There’s a lot of capital expenditure, there’s a lot of development that needs to happen before the state actually starts to draw income from that. And we’re sort of seeing the consequences of that a little bit now as companies invest more in production and, paradoxically, state coffers are taking a hit because of that.
So I’m curious how you would sort of solve the problem during your first term. If you only have four years, at the end of four years, how is the budget better off than it was when you started?
Well, you’re probably right, things are not going to be solved in the first term. But you can not just nip away at it, you can put some pretty big blows at the dysfunction, especially with our regulatory and permitting processes that are exceptionally slow here in Alaska. And I know the SPEED Act from the federal side is going to help considerably with that. Our energy development, natural resource development has now become a national strategic priority, so we do have the feds on our side with not being interested in a lot of bureaucratic delay and gridlock, and we’re seeing a lot more action on that side, and I’m very thankful for that.
It’s going to be some choppy waters to be navigated, like I said, five to seven years or so. The current oil fields, Sockeye, Pikka, I’m not sure in what order, which one is going to be on board next, I think about every year or 18 months, in general, there should be an increase in throughput.
So in the meantime, we need to be very frugal. We need to have that transparency of spending, the reallocation of funds that are being spent more appropriately to where they were originally intended. Most people do agree that our state needs to go through that transparency process, because we really have not, number one, had the technology to do it correctly, we haven’t had leaders that had the gumption or will to really carry it through. And our state, it rained money 40 to 50 years ago. The answer was always yes when people wanted expenditure there, a contract over here, and it’s not really been scrutinized heavily, and it’s time to do that, and that can help quite a bit.
The estimate that’s been put out by the feds is that across our nation, 10% to 15% of spending in all of our states is likely some version of waste, fraud and abuse. So if that’s true, that could be as high as $800 million. Now, our deficit spending is $1.5 billion to $2 billion right now, so $800 million in savings, even if we were able to find that, wouldn’t solve it. But obviously our biggest revenue source right now is the earnings of the Permanent Fund, and that should not be the goal. The goal is we have operational earnings from natural resource development and energy projects.
So there is going to be no easy, quick solution. But you know which direction to go, and the rules of the road, and the axioms and heuristics on how to get there. And I think if you stay disciplined, that each year things will get a little better, a little better.
Speaking of the state budget, the Department of Health has the largest budget of any state department. I believe it’s over $3 billion. And I’m curious, given your decades as a medical provider and in the medical industry, how you would approach healthcare and the Department of Health.
So the healthcare situation and education, they’re very similar, and they represent complexity at its finest. Not just complicated. You know, complicated is the Swiss watch. You study it close enough, work at it long enough, you can reproduce it. Complexity is something that involves cultural elements, unpredictable inputs. And healthcare — as you say, I was in the healthcare industry for 25, 30 years here in Alaska as a provider, as a clinic owner and surgery center operations, etc. And then I also went and got an MBA with an emphasis in the economics and business of healthcare.
And I’ll tell you that I have no easy answers for anyone that says, what can we do to solve healthcare. I do think that where we can deregulate, we do. I think that we need to give more freedoms to physician assistants to have generally independent practice after so many years of strong, safe practice in their area of expertise. We had proposed that. I was a part of that, our medical board that I presided within, we approved that a couple of years ago, and it never happened.
But in a healthcare system, which we don’t just have one system, we have multiple systems, you want reasonable cost. You really don’t want cheap. Cheap is something that the public would not want, because quality drops. So you want reasonable cost, you want high quality, you want accessibility, you want enough providers and facilities and specialists that they’re accessible. And then the fourth thing is you don’t want a system that burns out your providers, where they retire early, quit, leave the state, etc.
So how do you do that? Deregulating where you can is critically important, because the small providers, the medium-sized practices and clinics are buried in the regulatory environment that only the large health systems can abide. So that’s a real problem. When you have larger and larger systems consolidating the smaller players, then you get less accessibility. You get duopolies, oligopolies, etc., that don’t serve communities as well as the smaller and medium-sized clinics. So that is something that needs to be looked at.
The Medicaid situation largely is a result of the Medicaid expansion that Gov. Walker was the primary mover on, and at the time many people felt like it was a good idea because it was going to be like 95% paid for by the feds for, like, seven or eight years. Well, eventually those seven or eight years go away, and even though the feds are paying a lion’s share, that smaller percentage is still hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more. I can’t remember exactly what the budgetary number for Medicaid is right now.
But that, along with Obamacare, is probably in the process of being not just reformed but somewhat dismantled, because it’s unsustainable without substantial subsidies, and we really want a self-sustaining healthcare system if at all possible.
The way you get there is industry coming back to our state. Our state is open, it’s not closed for business. They knock on the door. They open up different industries that we can’t even imagine are coming around the pike, and they provide good, solid compensation packages that include private insurance. So getting more people in that private insurance pool will reduce the overall premiums that we’re paying, which have outpaced earnings for Alaskans right now. And that’s the big thing. Medicaid crowded people over into the subsidized Medicaid system and away from the private payer, and we have a reduced number of people dividing the same or increased healthcare expenditure. So it’s created this vicious cycle.
So are you saying that the state should roll back the Medicaid expansion, or at least substantially cut it back?
Ideally, yes. Yes. Not immediately, but I think in time there needs to be a plan to do that. And if you’re doing things correctly and industry is arriving, more and more people will have an opportunity for normal private insurance compensation as a part of their compensation package.
The other thing is, do you remember the catastrophic plan? Now, when I was 20 to 30 years old, we would get that $110 plan per month that would cover ER visits, catastrophic things, but it wouldn’t cover your usual office visits and things. That was very, very helpful for the healthy young population, and Obamacare made that illegal. And I think that was a big mistake. I think we need more options, more choices.
What would you say to the — I believe it’s tens of thousands of people who are in the expansion population. I imagine the way it would work is you would have to roll back the Medicaid expansion, and that would give the private sector a chance to expand, but there would be some sort of lag time there.
And what would you say to people who are in this expansion population in the meantime, between getting rid of the Medicaid expansion and the introduction or the expansion of private sector healthcare in Alaska?
Well, you’d hope that you could expand and diversify the economy in such a manner that it wouldn’t be this big catastrophic let-off with people being left in the lurch. We don’t want that. Certainly we don’t want that. And that would be legislative, and it would be an iterative process.
But the Medicaid also includes the SNAP benefits. That was also expanded pretty dramatically. We had a substantial failure in enrollment with the SNAP benefit situation, where 60% of individuals applying for that safety net program didn’t actually qualify, but they’ve been receiving SNAP benefits. That was the largest failure rate in the nation. Second only — excuse me, the second state was New Jersey, at a 17% failure rate. So we’re at 60%. We were fined, I think it was $44 million was the fine, something like that, from the feds.
So there’s a lot of problems in Alaska. We need greater transparency. Medicaid is supposed to be a safety net for those that are really in need, and there’s a lot of evidence that that’s not always the case here in Alaska with that expansion. It got quite liberal and permissive, and we didn’t filter out people very well, as proved by that 60% failure rate statistic.
Yeah, I believe that’s the (SNAP) payment error rate, and the state has gotten it down substantially since then, but it is still the highest in the nation. But I think we do have to move on just a little bit.
I want to talk about your time on the medical board, which I believe is your only foray into government so far. Last year in March, the board asked the Legislature to restrict hormonal and surgical treatment of gender dysphoria in minors, and then later, I believe in August, you, in your capacity on the medical board, proposed banning it via regulation. You resigned from the board that same day, and as far as I can tell, that regulation was never adopted.
And I’m curious how you would approach this issue as governor, what Alaskans can expect on this front if you’re elected governor.
That’s a good question. And just to clarify, the regulation change that I drafted, we did get it passed unanimously by the board, and it was strongly felt that that was in the initiative in protecting children. This was for individuals under 18. And much to our disappointment, even though we passed it unanimously at the medical board level, it went to the Department of Law, and it spent, as you’re pointing out, over a year without implementation, and frankly without a lot of answers as to where did it go, why was it not implemented.
And the only answers that I’m getting are that the attorneys and the staff within the Department of Law are not simply ministerial, that they just stamp things, regulation changes and things that boards pass, even if it’s unanimous, that they have some discretion. Well, I think that is demonstrating some severe dysfunction in the Department of Law.
We also deregulated the physician assistant guidelines and regulations to give them more autonomy, a lot more freedom, to make it simpler for them to be in practice in Alaska, to expand access. We again passed that unanimously, sent it off to the Department of Law, reducing regulation from 14 pages to three pages, and that was two years ago, and we never heard back from anyone. So it’s pretty frustrating to be a volunteer on one of these boards, in particular the State Medical Board, have the courage to do the right thing, hand it off to the Department of Law, and to have it be ignored without any feedback. And that is unacceptable.
So as governor, I’m going to find out where the bottlenecks are, and I’m going to change that. It must be more responsive. There needs to be more transparency. One way to do that is a virtual digital twin, much like your FedEx package, with either regulation changes, processes, permit applications, regulations, etc., you should be able to see where it is, whose desk it’s on, with a name and a number, how long it’s been there, so there is accountability. Right now there is no accountability, there is no transparency. That’s unacceptable.
We know with the transgendering of minors, it is a harmful thing. It never did reduce suicidal ideation. It didn’t solve anything. Now we have lots of lawsuits and awards being awarded to these victims that had mastectomies at 15, all these egregious things. A bioethicist made the comment saying that this transgendering of minors will go down as one of the most egregious abominations promoted by the medical establishment in the last century.
And that might be, obviously, it’s ahead of the opioid crisis. That was another thing the medical establishment was hugely a part of promoting. I remember when I was in medical school and residency what they were promoting. If you were underprescribing opioids, that was malpractice. You needed to be treating pain and treat it liberally, and addiction would not occur if you’re writing opioid prescriptions for pain. And this was pushed by industry. It was that pharmaceutical industrial complex in cahoots with those in the medical establishment that were not looking at things with the proper eye of skepticism and scrutiny.
So anyway, as governor, transparency is what must reign supreme. And the process was very open with regards to the transgendering of minors, and about 30-ish states have implemented statute in that regard, but we could not get our Legislature to act, so that’s why we did it in regulation.
I’m curious why you see that as such an important — I mean, you talked a little bit about it, but the American Medical Association, for instance, has called state bans on gender-affirming healthcare for minors a dangerous intrusion into the practice of medicine. And I guess I’m curious what you think of that.
So what happened — and I think that was their original statement. I’m not so sure that it’s still there, because they changed their position after the surgeons that were tasked with doing these surgeries, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, put out a statement about eight months ago, nine months ago, saying that this is actually harmful and should not be done until a minor becomes an adult. And then the AMA changed their position. Like, OK, wait a minute, maybe we don’t think that it’s a good practice. They at least tempered their approval.
And basically, it was thought that hormone blockers, hormone replacements, et cetera, was some kind of a reversible thing. But once you’ve stopped puberty, you don’t get to do a do-over. And I have heard and read the testimony in some of these court cases of now-young adults that had these things done to them, that they just wished somebody had asked the question: Does this make sense? Is this something that should have been done? And now they’re getting multimillion-dollar judgments awarded to them.
And when harm is occurring, the diagnosis being factitious — there is just, intuitively, people can feel a certain way that they should be something different, but the reality is we are born male or female. There are some rare exceptions with ambiguity of genitalia that needs to be dealt with, etc. But how we are born as male or female is fact. It’s biological. And once you’re an adult, you have all the freedoms in the world. OK, they’re your decisions. But while you’re a minor, these things, the medical board has a responsibility to protect minors from harm and mutilation. And it’s now becoming much more of a worldwide conclusion, with Europe largely banning these treatments prior to our attempted ban here.
So I stand strong there, and I made it very clear that this is not about persecuting anyone. We are called to love everyone. But it is about minors and the regret that is becoming so evident across the country with these lawsuits.
I’m curious more broadly the sort of role that you see for the government in deciding what sort of healthcare people should and should not be able to access. For instance, at that same meeting where you proposed the draft regulation related to transgender minors, the board also asked lawmakers to restrict abortion in late pregnancy.
Of course, the Alaska Constitution, the privacy clause, protects abortion access. So on that note, I’m curious where you stand and how you would approach the issue of abortion if elected governor.
Right, that’s a great question. So I’m pro-life. I’m very pragmatic about it. And in our state, and I believe it’s seven other states, so we’re a minority of the states, kind of an outlier, that allow abortion up to and including the moment of birth. So most people consider that to be infanticide at that point. And the very strange thing about that is almost nobody knows about that. None of us on the medical board — and we had family practice physicians, general surgeons — actually knew that. And I think that’s a failure of the media, not reporting that. Did you know that there is no limit on abortion, including all the way to the moment of birth?
Well, the question we’re asked is, how often does that happen? Why does it matter? Well, if it did happen, you would have no recourse. How often does child abduction occur? More than it should, but not like every day. But it’s still illegal, because it’s an egregious, horrible thing.
And abortion, theologically, right from the moment of conception, our pro-life position, it’s an equal abomination. But really in our consciousness, and I think all Alaskans agree, even my pro-choice friends would say, you know what, that’s a bit much, we don’t agree with that, that is not consistent with our values as Alaskans, to have it legal all the way to the moment of birth. That reminds us of the story of Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia, in that podcast series, Serial Killer. It is horrible to think that those things can happen when the investigators, the boards and commissions don’t do proper inspections, because the field of abortion is a touchy hot topic. It’s a political hot potato, and it has a chilling effect on its regulation. And things start happening in the background, and it can go on for decades without knowing it. And we can’t be like that.
If you’re not aware of the Kermit Gosnell story, he’s doing multiple life sentences. I’m not sure if he’s still alive. But you can see how you can rationalize, if you can do abortion within minutes of birth — well, why can’t you just do it a little easier when they’re on the back table, because it’s kind of hard to do it the way that is traditional.
So we need to knock it back at least. At the least, it should not be all the way to the moment of birth. And I’d say, from my informal survey, it seems like 90% of Alaskans agree with that.
Is that something that you think could be done with the current constitution, or would it require a constitutional amendment?
You know what’s interesting? The State Medical Board has been delegated the authority to regulate the practice of abortion by the Legislature. It’s in regulation, it’s in statute. Now, what does that mean? That’s where the courts get in there and say, well, it means this, it doesn’t mean that.
And something interesting happened while I was on the medical board. In our regulation, it says that you have to at least be a physician to perform an abortion. And that would not be me, a podiatric physician, right? Because my world is below the knee. But it could be an MD or a DO, because they are an OB-GYN, they are more universally practicing throughout the whole body. And Planned Parenthood had decided they wanted to have nurses or nurse practitioners performing abortions at their clinics here in Alaska, and our State Medical Board said, hey, wait a minute, they don’t do residencies. These are surgical procedures that can go awry rapidly, with hemorrhaging, penetration of the uterus, all kinds of weird things. And nurse practitioners do not have surgical residency training to deal with these things, and it’s at the discretion of the State Medical Board to regulate the practice of abortion.
Well, Planned Parenthood then sued each of us on the medical board as individuals and as an entity together, and they won. So I know that our Department of Law appealed that, and I’ve not really heard what the outcome was. But so the medical board does in fact have the authority to regulate the practice of abortion. I do believe that they could say, hey, no abortion in the ninth month, just to be absurd. I mean, pretty much everybody agrees with that, because there’s never a reason for an abortion in the ninth month. You can give birth. The child is always viable, typically, in the ninth month.
But you’ve got to start somewhere. Somebody has to be bold enough to lead on these topics. You can’t be foolish into believing you can outlaw abortion all the way. You’d have riots in the streets. But I think there is a compromise there, not to be so extreme. The first, though, is public awareness that it may in fact be happening out there. And if it does, it will only be regret that it was legal.
I want to talk about another topic. You’ve put a lot of money into your own race. You’ve put more money than any other candidate, I believe nearly $1.5 million as of the latest report in July. It accounts for more than 90% of your own funding. We’ve talked about this a little before. But I did want to ask the question: What would you say to someone who sees that as you trying to buy influence, or buy your way all the way into office?
So it certainly doesn’t buy influence, I’ll tell you that. What buys influence is when people give a candidate a bunch of money. That buys influence, that creates perverse incentives, quid pro quos.
When you’re funding your own race, which — a candidate that is not a part of the apparatus, at least in our state, and I think it’s true in all states, must expect to have to spend a lot of their own money, because there’s uncertainty. The typical donors are in a pattern of who do I know, who’s in government, who has already been in office. And again, the political apparatus tends to promote those that they know. So the outside candidate, it is just a reality. You’re not going to get known. You’re not going to solve the name recognition problem in a state as large as Alaska without spending a considerable amount of money.
And my wife was asked that question the other day by somebody: Are you really thrilled that you’ve spent this much money? She made the comment, as we had discussed, that we’ve invested in companies because we believed in individuals. I told a young man once, “You know what, I don’t know a lot about your field, but I’m going to put a fair amount of money to back you because I believe in you.”
And Stacey and I decided, you know what, I am providing a value as a candidate that the other candidates are not providing: my extensive experience in the private sector, and the courage to actually do things and to do the right thing. And if we don’t believe in the mission, and that’s the next generation, and if we don’t believe in what we have to offer, well then we shouldn’t be investing that amount of money. But again, if we’re willing to back people in their businesses, why are we not willing to back ourselves in a mission to help the next generation stay here in Alaska? So that’s the answer there.
I want to close with one more question, which is, how would you distinguish yourself? There are just days before the primary. There are 17 candidates running for four spots on our general election ballot.
So I’m curious, what is your closing pitch to voters in the final few days? Who do you see as the typical Matt Heilala voter?
I think it’s the Alaskan voter that is tired of watching the same movie, that same movie with a different cast of characters that show up during a new election cycle. They’re all from the system that people are tired of, the bureaucratic culture of gridlock and delay. And that movie where the new hero rides up on the steed saying, I’m going to save this town, here’s all the great things I’m going to do. But you know what, they’ve been there for years and they’ve done nothing notable, nothing courageous. They’ve been a part of the problem, many of them. I don’t want to disparage those that have served us in their public office, but people are wanting a new script, one that elects someone different, someone from the private sector that has the independence and the courage to do the right thing, and that they’re not beholden to any special interest other than Alaskans and, in particular, the next generation.
So my passion lies with that next generation, to make sure they choose Alaska as their number one choice to live, work and raise families. And it’s mostly about economics, getting people to come together, to unify. That’s what I’ve done for 30 years in business — unifying people that are otherwise embattled, warring, to come together for that common cause, because gridlock and delay in the private sector equals bankruptcy, and that’s something we can’t tolerate.
So I represent that new script. I represent that new form of leadership that people have been asking for. And I’m getting a lot of people coming up and reaching out to us saying, you know what, we get it, we’re supporting you. And the mission is, they’ve got to spread the word. We’ve got to establish social proof that the guy that you’ve not heard of before — look into his background, the diversity, commercial fishing, medicine, surgery, business — and see that that’s the change we want.
