Health care access and strong schools are central to Alison Page in her bid for an Assembly seat in western Wisconsin

The former hospital CEO is bringing a wealth of experience to the 30th Assembly District as well as a lifelong belief that it’s important to ‘lean in’ and solve problems.

When Alison Page was growing up in River Falls as the sixth of nine kids, her father, one of the town’s doctors, had a saying.

“When you see something that’s not right in the world, it’s not your prerogative to stand by and watch. You have to do something, you have to lean in. It’s required,” Page recounted to UpNorthNews. “I would say I just come from a family of doers. People who feel very responsible for the community and our society.”

It’s a saying that Page has lived by during her long career in health care, including time as CEO of Western Wisconsin Health, a Baldwin-based hospital and clinic. And it’s why she is running as a Democrat in Wisconsin’s 30th Assembly District, challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Shannon Zimmerman, who was first elected in 2016.

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The 30th Assembly district — which includes River Falls, Hudson, and North Hudson — is considered competitive, according to a Marquette University analysis, under new maps that ended a long Republican gerrymander that had given the GOP a much greater majority of seats compared to their overall level of statewide voter support.

“This seat is winnable,” said Page, who ran for the Assembly in 2022 in the former, more-Republican 93rd District. She lost to Rep. Warren Petryk, but “got good experience under my belt as a candidate.”

“I think I would be an excellent representative for this area,” she said. “Having lived here my whole life, having run one of the major organizations in the region for a good chunk of time, I really have a good sense of this region and could do a good job.”

Page, a mother of five and grandmother of seven, started her career with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from Marquette University, saying her life’s mission is to “make the world a better place for children and families to live, starting in western Wisconsin. If we do that, everything else falls into place.”

It’s why she contemplated becoming a physician but held back since that would have “been over the line” for her conservative Catholic parents, who viewed college for their daughters primarily as preparation for them to ”marry well.”

Nevertheless, Page has no regrets about her choice of nursing—“I love hospitals.”

“Literally from the first day I walked into the hospital, I always wanted to run the place,” Page remembered. 

And that’s exactly what she did, rising through hospital administrative positions to become the chief executive at Western Wisconsin Health for 13 years.

Page brings to her Assembly campaign the experience of running a successful business with 400 employees as well as 17 years on the River Falls Board of Education—and all the ups and downs of parenthood.

“I’m running because we need people to lean in and take their skills to government and get things done,” she said.

After running a hospital through the COVID crisis, she seems well-equipped to handle the many challenges of representing her neighbors. 

“It was my job to keep my employees safe (during COVID) and to keep everyone coming through the door for care as safe as possible and to provide them with care that was based on the best science we knew,” Page said. 

It was a job that had her working late nights during the pandemic, calling other hospitals in Wisconsin and five other states to find rooms for her sickest patients, since Western Wisconsin Health didn’t have an Intensive Care Unit and only a few ventilators. 

“We had patients going everywhere” by helicopter, she said.

Keeping cool under stress is something that Page learned early growing up in a household of nine kids.

“It takes a lot to get me rattled,” she noted. 

She and her husband David, a dentist, married when she was 19. They learned she was pregnant in the spring of her junior year in college due to a birth control failure. Her oldest son, Adam, was born on a Tuesday morning during finals week.

“I took a final on Monday morning, went home and into labor, had the baby and went in and took a final at 11 a.m. on Wednesday morning, and then went back to the hospital,” Page explained.

Now she brings her business expertise and her very personal perspective of being a mom to her views on two of the biggest issues residents raise when she knocks neighborhood doors: abortion care and public education. 

Reproductive rights frequently comes up, especially with women who say they want to have the freedom to control their own bodies.

That’s a stance that Page passionately supports in stark contrast to her Republican opponent. She strongly opposed interpreting an 1849 law as an abortion ban, which halted all abortions in the state for 15 months before a court ruled the statute did not apply to elective abortions.

Zimmerman, on the other hand, was one of the sponsors of a 14-week abortion ban bill in the Assembly and has been given a top ranking in the 2024 election by Wisconsin Right to Life. The group’s Political Action Committee endorsed him in 2022. Page on the other hand is endorsed by Planned Parenthood Action of Wisconsin.

“I certainly appreciated having choice in my life,” said Page, who made the decision to have a therapeutic abortion during a dangerous fourth pregnancy in 1982 that left her hospitalized for weeks. 

“I was very, very sick with my blood pressure skyrocketing, and my kidneys started to fail,” she said. “I was 26 years old. I had three small children at home. How much risk was I willing to take with my kidneys? … Would they come back?… The doctors were worried I might stroke out.”

“And I said, we’re stopping here and I was able to make that choice and they (her doctors) were fine with that choice. They supported me in that choice.”

Today abortions in Wisconsin are legal up to fetal viability, about 22-23  weeks, after which abortions can only be provided to prevent a woman’s death or if a 24-hour delay will result in a serious risk of a woman’s irreversible impairment of one or more of the woman’s major bodily functions.

“What gets me upset about these conversations about abortion is people act like these are black-and-white decisions, and they are anything but,” she said. “That doesn’t work for clinicians … I worked in a hospital since I was 12 and I have yet to see a crystal ball in any clinical area. The doctors don’t know. They can’t say you’re going to be dead in 24 hours … doctors aren’t magic.”

She suspects that Amber Thurman, who suffered from an incomplete miscarriage in Georgia, died at age 28 because her doctors were afraid to provide lifesaving treatment because of an abortion law similar to Wisconsin’s. It required her to be close to death before doctors could provide necessary care.

When Page knocks on the door of Republicans who tell her they oppose any legal abortion, she tries to find common ground, suggesting that if Wisconsin provided medical, daycare, and other services which would enable women and families to be able to afford having a child if they wanted, it could reduce the number of abortions in the state.

Raising questions like these often leads to great conversations, she said.

Page, a graduate of River Falls High School, also reported that the state of public education is a big concern at voter doors.

“Our constitution in the state of Wisconsin calls on the state to provide a good and equitable education to every child. And that the education received by children across the state should be as equitable from community to community as possible,” she pointed out. 

She has watched over the years as former Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators slashed the budget for public schools and the University of Wisconsin System. And now hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being siphoned off to private schools with the student voucher program.

“About $700 million (in 2024) is being transferred to private schools. Where’s that money coming from? That’s tax money. That’s our tax money,” she emphasized. “And we are not obligated in our constitution to fund private education … I’m in favor of building a strong, excellent public education system.”

She believes that public education offers both excellent educational and social benefits for Wisconsin’s children and teenagers. 

“This is where we come together. This is where we learn to appreciate people from other places. So it’s the equalizer, it’s the integrator, it’s the educator,” she says.

”And those things are so important to our society that they need to be held high and supported, not systematically destroyed. I’m afraid that’s a little bit of what’s happening right now with K-12 education – it’s systematic underfunding.”

The high cost of living unsurprisingly is another key 2024 election issue. Page says that if she’s elected, she is committed to do all she can to lower costs for her constituents who have been hit hard by post-pandemic inflation.

“A gentleman I was speaking with last week was crying, telling me about his family and his story about not being able to pay his bills,” she said. “30% of people who live in Pierce and St Croix Counties … they’re the working poor. They’re working full-time trying, but they can’t pay their bills. They can barely make it. I told this gentleman that you are not alone.”

Page plans to fight for an increase in the minimum wage of $7.25 and she vows to work to make housing more affordable, and to assist with childcare costs, all things that will help the state’s families.

As for her own family, her husband David has “been out [putting up] signs, talking to people. And the good thing about him is, when you’re a dentist, you see a patient every 10 minutes. So he knows every third person in the district.”

Page is excited about bringing her experience of managing diverse hospital teams to the Assembly, which for the first time in years could have a  nearly-equal number of Democrats and Republicans.

“My opponent … he’s definitely a Republican and he has yet to do anything that isn’t in lockstep with what Republicans are proposing,” Page said. “But my job (in hospitals) was bringing people together who didn’t agree with each other on how we find common ground. How do we move forward? And we made huge gains.”