Instead, they are simply abusing their position of public trust to benefit their private business -- even if it means gutting protections for the old, the frail and the dying.
Mark Thompson, 46, was elected to the Arizona House of Representatives from District 17 in 2002. He ran as a "clean elections" candidate and received $31,000 in public funds, of which he paid his wife $2,888 for "political consulting."
After his election, Representative Thompson was awarded a position by House Republican leadership on the Health Committee, a perfect perch to boost the fortunes of his business.
His election came a year after Connie Thompson, 47, was appointed by then-governor Jane Hull to an obscure regulatory board that oversees nursing homes and assisted living facilities. The post gave Connie Thompson an inside track into structuring regulations that directly affect the family business.
From these two positions of public trust -- the legislator and the regulator -- the couple are in position to craft laws and regulations to benefit their business while, not coincidentally, stripping protections for the elderly out of state law.
Late last month, Mark Thompson voted for a bill in the House Health Committee that included an amendment -- which wasn't read into the record or debated -- that shields health-care institutions from being sued under the state's elder protection laws. The bill passed 8-4 and awaits action by the full House later this week.
House Bill 2439 provides civil immunity from elder protection laws to hundreds of assisted living centers in Arizona that do business with the Thompsons' company, Adult Care Consultants.
The Thompsons' company has a firm grip on providing patient referrals and licensing assistance to the fastest-growing segment of the elder care business. Unlike nursing homes, the state does not regulate those who provide direct care to the elderly in assisted living centers, but licenses only the managers of these businesses.
Even without the amendment gutting the right to seek legal redress, HB 2439 gives abused animals more legal protection than elderly adults, who are sometimes subjected to horrific conditions in facilities that care for the elderly.
"The elderly would have to park their constitutional rights at the door," says Barry Gold, director of the Governor's Council on Aging.
The American Association for Retired People, the Alzheimer's Association and several other major elder care advocacy groups are opposed to the bill.
The bill is touted by proponents -- including major hospital, nursing home and assisted living center operators -- and is expected to lead to significant savings in insurance costs. That could be a substantial windfall for the more than 1,200 assisted living centers scattered across the state -- the vast majority of which do business with the Thompsons' company.
Mark Thompson's participation in the hearing and subsequent vote in favor of the bill and amendment is a notorious example of a conflict of interest -- at least to me. The Republican legislator voted for a bill that potentially offers immense financial benefit to his business and its customers while gutting a legal remedy that provides a shred of protection to the elderly.
Mark Thompson has declined to talk to me about his self-serving vote.
But under the vapid House Ethics Rules, Mark Thompson's action is not a conflict of interest because his business is just one of a "class" of businesses that stand to benefit from the bill. In fact, Mark Thompson is a rising star in the House that is controlled with an iron fist by a couple of conservative Mormon Republicans -- Speaker of the House Jake Flake and House Majority Leader Eddie Farnsworth.
Flake last month stripped two Republican lawmakers of their committee chairs because they went against his wishes during last winter's special session on Child Protective Services by voting to spend more money to protect children. Freshman rep Mark Thompson was then awarded chairmanship of one of those, the Human Services Committee, for his boot-licking skills. It is very unusual for a first-term legislator to chair a committee.
At the same time Mark Thompson is doing his dirty work in the Legislature, wife Connie is under fire for unethical behavior as a member of a board that must have the longest and most cumbersome name of any regulatory panel in the state: the Arizona Board of Examiners of Nursing Care Institution Administrators and Assisted Living Facility Managers -- or the ABENCIAALFM for short.
Connie Thompson's effort in the last year to promote her personal business interests has paralyzed the board, which is supposed to be helping to protect the elderly from abuse in nursing homes and assisted living centers. Instead, it's bogged down in a personnel battle with her.
State records show that the board's executive director, Victoria Martin, believes that Connie Thompson has an undeclared conflict of interest because as a board member she approves training procedures for managers of assisted living centers at the same time her company offers management training courses.
Martin's complaints, first lodged last spring, eventually triggered an Attorney General's Office criminal investigation into Connie Thompson's conduct. The AG declined last September to prosecute Thompson, despite turning up plenty of muck. But the investigation, along with other information gathered by executive director Martin, ultimately led to a most unusual action.
The board voted unanimously on February 5 to request Connie Thompson's resignation. The board stated its reasons in a February 25 letter to Connie Thompson, a copy of which I obtained late Friday.
"The Board is asking for your resignation because it believes you have been using your Board membership to promote your personal interests rather than to serve the public interest.
"It is the Board's determination that you have repeatedly acted independently concerning Board business, without the Board's knowledge or consent and contrary to the Board's positions. Your inappropriate conduct has been disruptive and detrimental to the Board's ability to function and conduct business.
"Therefore, the Board hereby asks that you resign."
Such a rebuke would spur most people to quickly dash off a letter expressing thanks for the opportunity to serve the public but allowing how it's time to pursue other interests. But not Connie Thompson -- who is acting an awful lot like disgraced former Corporation Commission member Jim Irvin and bracing herself for a fight.
"I haven't made up my mind" whether to resign, she told me late Friday afternoon before the interview disintegrated and she ended the call.
Connie Thompson hung up on me after I started questioning her about her October 23, 2001, board application.
The application, which Connie Thompson certified to be true, includes a question that states: "To your knowledge, have any formal charges of professional misconduct, criminal misdemeanor or a felony ever been filed against you in any jurisdiction?"
Connie Thompson checked the "no" box.
Which is a lie.
In 1982, a grand jury out of Pima County returned a two-count indictment that charged Connie Thompson, then known as Connie Stacey Lynn Lutz, with hindering prosecution and obstruction of a criminal investigation. The recent AG investigation turned up those charges.
The May 28, 1982, indictment charged Connie "with the intent to hinder the apprehension, prosecution, conviction or punishment of Alan Robert Terry for first degree murder."
Now that's something one doesn't easily forget.
The Pima County attorney dropped the charges against Connie in August 1982. But that doesn't change what should have been the proper answer to the question on Connie Thompson's board application of whether she had ever been charged with a felony.
Pressed to explain what happened in 1982 and why she failed to disclose the grand jury felony indictment, Connie Thompson hung up the phone.
She knows she doesn't have to deal with the press. And she knows there is little the state can do to get her off the board even though she lied on her application and has been asked to resign.
Dora Vasquez, director of the governor's office of boards and commissions, says there is no provision in state law that allows the board to forcibly remove Connie Thompson if she refuses to resign. Not even Governor Janet Napolitano can get rid of Connie Thompson, Vasquez says.
So it appears that nothing can stop Connie Thompson until her term thankfully expires on January 1, 2005.
Don't think for a moment that the Thompsons' self-serving behavior is an aberration when it comes to protecting the elderly from abuses in nursing homes and assisted-care living centers.
The legislation that strips away the right to sue health-care facilities, including hospitals, was sponsored by Representative Phil Hanson, a Republican from Peoria and a retired hospital executive.
Hanson says he sponsored the amendment at the request of the Arizona Hospital and Health Care Association -- a powerful group that supported Hanson in his privately financed election campaign. Hanson says he's no longer a member of the group and told me he didn't make financial contributions to it, either. Apparently, he forgot about the $150 he gave to its PAC last year, a contribution sizable enough to put him into the group's "Player's Club."
At a February 19 House Health Committee hearing moments before Hanson sneaked the amendment exempting health-care facilities from civil litigation into HB 2439 without a proper reading or opportunity for debate, he belittled the testimony of a witness who complained about a health-care facility allowing a patient to sit in soiled diapers for three hours.
"I don't think that rises to the level of gross negligence," he said. "Negligence, yes. Mistake, yes. . . . But it's not gross negligence."
The operative word here is "gross."
HB 2439 also raises the legal standard of when abuse takes place in a health-care facility for the elderly from simple negligence to "gross negligence."
Which means in the brutal world of health care embraced by industry advocates like Hanson and Mark Thompson, it's okay for the elderly to stew helplessly for hours in their own excrement.
After all, Hanson says old people are delirious anyway.
"When you're older and senile, time has no meaning," he says.
Thankfully, time still does have meaning for most of us.
Come November, it will be time to boot Phil Hanson and Mark Thompson out of office.
E-mail [email protected], or call 602-229-8445.
