Sullivan’s doctored ‘Gross Tapes’ are not ‘Pebble Tapes’
Several times during a televised debate Friday, Sen. Dan Sullivan plugged his campaign website that purports to contain “shocking new video” of Dr. Al Gross.
He said it so often it came off like a promo for an episode of Dr. Phil or a Catch a Predator revival.
What’s surprising, if not shocking, is that Sullivan thought he could freely take phrases and a few sentences out of context—from an easily available video of Gross—without being caught.
To make this clear, the claims on Sullivan’s site distort what Gross said on Nov. 29, 2017 when he spoke for 10 minutes at the 49th State Brewing Co. about how he became an advocate for reforming the health care system.
Sullivan’s website, which is not grosstapes.com as Sullivan says, but dralgrosssenate.com, hints the out-of-context video clips were derived from a mysterious source and disclosed information that Gross wanted to keep secret. “Caught,” says the headline next to an image of Gross.
“Recently uncovered tapes of Al Gross have come to light,” a Sullivan ad claims, as ominous music plays in the background. “Dr. Al boasts about how he’s made millions of dollars on the backs of hard-working Alaskans.”
The full tape from which the out-of-context quotes are from has been posted on the website of Alaska Common Ground for nearly three years. It was broadcast on public radio on Jan. 12, 2018.
The only thing that “has come to light” is that this is a cheap shot from Sullivan.
It’s pretty clear that Sullivan is desperate to find a way to hit back at Gross on the Pebble Tapes, in which top executives of the Pebble Mine said Sullivan was “off in a corner being quiet” and posed no threat to Pebble. Since then, Sullivan has been complaining that he has been a solid opponent of the mine for nearly two months.
The Gross Tapes are not the Pebble Tapes.
“He’s admitted fleecing Alaskans. I’d like everybody to go take a look at grosstapes.com, that’s out recently, talking about how he did that. And really incredible actually, to see his unethical behavior as a doctor,” Sullivan said at the debate.
“Again Alaskans, go to grosstapes.com, you will see an unethical doctor. It’s stunning,” Sullivan said.
What is unethical is the way that Sullivan has misrepresented what Gross said. I’d like everybody to look at the original video of the Nov. 29th event and compare it to Sullivan’s claims.
When it was time for Gross to speak at that 2017 event, he said, “I’m not a status quo guy, as you will find out.”
He briefly reviewed his history in Alaska, his medical training and what happened when he returned to Juneau to begin practice as a surgeon.
“As the checks and the EOBs (explanation of benefits) started coming in and I realized that I was being paid three to five times the national average of my colleagues, that were equally trained, I became very interested in health care economics and trying to understand why there was such a massive discrepancy between what we were paid here versus down south,” he said.
“And I ran into a senior billing manager that I’d known for many years. She didn’t work for me. And I said, “How can this be? What’s behind this?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know, but there’s a ton of money on the table and you’d be a fool not to take it. Everyone else is.’”
“So that’s what we’ve all been doing up here really,” he said.
Gross said that most of the doctors he knows in Alaska are good people who went into medicine for the right reasons.
“But I think that we all know that money has a tendency to corrupt. And there’s been a lot of money on the table. And in my opinion, it’s the system that’s corrupt, not the people. And it’s the system that needs to be changed,” he said.
He said as time went by he “became progressively disillusioned with the way we deliver health care in Alaska and in the country.” He said he saw greed, envy, backstabbing, infighting, over-utilization and excessive self-referral, which led him and his wife to go back to school in 2013-2014, studying health care economics at UCLA.
“I think some of you may consider me a hypocrite for having profited off the system and I certainly did. But I didn’t come to Alaska for that reason. And to be honest I didn’t understand the health care economics at all when I came back here. What was important to me was coming back to Alaska and raising my family here, providing care for people that I grew up with. And more than anything I want my kids and their kids to have the same opportunities that I had growing up in Alaska.”
“And I truly believe that Alaska is not going to be able to pull out of its economic tailspin until we can figure out how to contain the prices of health care in Alaska. And for me it came down to a decision of wanting to be part fo the solution rather than perpetuating the problem. So that’s how I got involved in health care reform.”
The image below shows the misquotes and out-of-context quotes that Sullivan claims represent what Gross said, but were shortened to distort what he was really saying.
