With hospitals overwhelmed, Dunleavy tries to distract Alaska with another wasteful special session

There is no excuse for the special session of the Alaska Legislature that is supposed to start Monday in Juneau, courtesy of the grandstanding governor. There is also no point.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy ordered that the session take place as part of his re-election campaign. But the Legislature is not going to approve a bigger dividend. The $1,114 payments are set to go out this month. This is grandstanding by Dunleavy.

Worse, Dunleavy has never offered a coherent fiscal plan and his understanding of the problem appears limited to three letters—PFD. That’s how he hopes to get re-elected.

This session is a waste of state money. The responsibility falls entirely on Dunleavy.

He has refused to cancel the session in the face of our health crisis, hoping to distract Alaskans from the real emergency that threatens every Alaska—the collapse of normal standards of health care with our hospitals flooded with unvaccinated Alaskans.

It would be best for Alaska legislators to end the special session immediately.

If legislative leaders can’t get the votes to do that, they should suspend the rules and allow committees to meet remotely for the next month, advancing the collective understanding of the fiscal tradeoffs facing Alaskans.

Legislators can do that without the expense of a special session, but the grandstander hopes to win points on publicity.

Dunleavy and every other elected official in Alaska should be focused now on the hospital emergency. Both the New York Times and the online edition of the Wall Street Journal had stories Sunday about how doctors in Alaska are being forced to make life-or-death decisions that they never imagined possible in our state.

Most of our hospitals have now adopted crisis standards, which translates into the rationing of health care on a day-by-day basis.

“Our goal has always been to avoid having systems overwhelmed,” Dr. Anne Zink told the New York Times. “And right now we have systems overwhelmed.”

The Wall Street Journal headlined: ‘Overwhelmed by Covid-19 Patients, Alaska's Doctors Make Life-and-Death Decisions; An Anchorage hospital is rationing care while rural hospitals try to make supplies last until they can transfer patients”

"We have the most highly sophisticated medicine and advanced training in the world, and we're having to ration care," Javid Kamali, an intensive-care doctor at Providence, told the Journal. "We didn't sign up for this."

“The 11-bed Providence Valdez Medical Center in southeast Alaska, which often sends patients to its corporate hub hospital in Anchorage, has started to conserve oxygen under the state's crisis standards by limiting how much doctors pump into patients who are struggling to breathe, said chief of staff John Cullen.”

"I don't think anybody has experienced anything like this in their lifetime," Cullen told the newspaper.

The Washington Post said that the shift to rationed care in Alaska, Idaho and Montana, is “one of the worst-case outcomes that had yet to materialize even in the winter wave.”

And what do we get from Dunleavy?

The Anchorage Daily News printed a campaign press release as a guest opinion in which Dunleavy claims that “Alaska continues to hold its own.”

This is a lie.

If the Daily News and other Alaska newspapers insist on running Dunleavy press releases as guest opinions, they should at least provide an annotated version that identifies lies and half-truths.

“The facts demonstrate Alaska has done better than most states so far and will continue to defy all odds,” says whichever state employee wrote this nonsense in the voice of candidate Dunleavy.

The state’s chief medical officer is right and Dunleavy is wrong: “Our goal has always been to avoid having systems overwhelmed. And right now we have systems overwhelmed.”

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