Our Elders and Care-givers are Not Livestock

Here's a nasty surprise no family should ever face. Working class baby boomers are going broke and wasting away in facilities that are dangerously understaffed. Their Gen-X and Millennial children expect them to be cared for with dignity in their final years and to inherit something from their parents when they pass, but many care facilities provide less than the law requires, and take everything from their patients.

When it comes time for your parents to go into care homes, you want to take comfort that they will live their last days in peace and dignity. Round-the-clock care. Professional staff. But the truth is often different. Too many of these homes just warehouse the elderly. They follow state standards in the cheapest way possible, if at all. Meanwhile, your loved one's wealth and your tax dollars get drained at rates that can only be described as "highway robbery." I've been told of how heartbreaking it is to watch an elderly resident fight back tears when they have to sell their house to afford a care home.

I have a lot of friends who work at these places. The stories they tell are awful. Staff get abused and underpaid. These are state-licensed professionals: Certified Nursing Assistants, Registered Nurses, Certified Care-Givers. But they often get paid worse than fast food workers. Nurses make a little more—not enough to cover nursing school. And they're expected to do the work of several people at once.

These homes pay literal pennies over minimum wage. The work is relentless and hard. It involves tasks most people would rather not do—helping residents bathe, use the restroom, cleaning up messes with bodily waste. So callout rates are regularly 50-90 percent of the entire shift.

The state has standards for these facilities. But the facilities can't meet them because the working conditions and pay are so terrible. The state standard is 1 CNA for every 10 residents. I've heard from CNAs who said they were the only CNA in a facility with 100 people. They were forced to work alone for 18-hour shifts for days on end.

The maximum allowed wait time for a resident to get help is 10 minutes. But residents often wait hours. Soiled clothes. Hunger. Pain. Unbearable temperatures. Medical emergencies. No one answers because the care staff is working long past their shift and serving too many residents. Staff turnover is rampant. So are preventable infections, illness, and injury. To then add insult, the CNAs who don't have the capacity to provide all required care within mandated time standards get write-ups and disciplinary actions that can go against their licensure. Imagine, being the only person who showed up to work on a 10 person crew and being punished and having your ability to work in that field threatened when you didn't do the work of 9 additional people.

Let me say this plainly. Some of these investor-owned facilities are committing elder abuse. Worker abuse. And something dangerously close to fraud. It doesn't matter if 10 CNAs show up or just 1. The resident, their insurance, and the government still get billed full price for a standard of care the resident never receives. We can’t have our elders living in slumlord tenements run like sweatshops.

The problem is the wages. These facilities don't pay enough to keep staff. That creates a death spiral. If the State could require a "prevailing wage" – what workers are worth – these places would be fully staffed. But a state law from 1984 (A.R.S. § 34-321) blocks that. It was passed by a public vote, and the legislature can't change it. Phoenix and Tucson tried in 2024. The courts said no.

I live in Sierra Vista. We have been a military and retirement community since we were chartered. These "pirate equity" facilities are exposing our seniors to dangerous neglect. They extort away life savings. They force our caregivers into exhaustion and poverty.

There are more effects. Many caregivers have children at home who barely see their parents. Those children need their own care and supervision, which costs extra money. Working people barely have enough to cover expenses. They have zero time for leisure. So the wider economy suffers. The market gets bled dry. People can't buy goods and services. And it gets worse when the providers of vital things—food, housing, utilities, transportation, education, medical care—are also owned by investors who raise prices until sales drop. Then a lot of people can't meet their basic needs.

It's like living in a company town. But instead of one company, it's an entire economy run like a mob that takes 40% off every transaction as "protection." The government helps them. It favors them. They get called "community leaders." But they're just running a bad system and charging everyone a premium.

We need to make our home ours again. Our communities. Our economy. Our government.

For this problem, we start with a non-medical home care co-op. Unionizing means workers band together to bargain with management. That's an adversarial relationship. A co-op is different. The workers own it. The investors are the workers. The shareholders are the workers. The management is the workers.

Here's the business model. Right now, non-medical home care agencies charge $50 to $70 an hour. The actual care provider gets $15 to $20 of that. $5 goes to administrative costs. The other 40 to 60 percent is profit that leaves town forever.

A co-op can charge $45 an hour. $30 goes to the provider. $5 to admin. $10 gets reinvested into the co-op to expand. Since the co-op charges less, it wins bids for work. Since wages are nearly double, it gets all the good care providers. Taking corporate shareholders out leaves enough money for workers to make a dignified wage and for clients to afford care.

We can start this in weeks. It doesn't take a lot of money. Just workers with skills and credentials. This would let many seniors stay in their own homes. They could keep their nest eggs to pass on to their children. It would cut healthcare costs because workers would be rested, well paid, and content. It would prevent injuries, infections, and illnesses among our most medically vulnerable. And it would keep wealth in our communities instead of pumping it out to Wall Street.

This co-op model can be copied across our local economy. Replace gig work apps, temp agencies, and contracting companies that take the lion's share while providing almost nothing. We don't need outside corporate administrators to tax us for things we can do ourselves at 40% of every transaction. We can do these things for ourselves. Then we can invest in the capital to start making exportable goods and services. That brings outside money to us. Instead of our whole economy being a pass-through for government money to go to corporate monopolies. I've written The Arizona Resilient Infrastructure and Capital Cooperative Framework Act (ARICC) https://www.slawsonforazdistrict19.org/legislation-proposals/aricc to bring this about at scale to the people of Arizona.

As a State Senator, I will use the investigative and legislative power of the office to expose negligent, corrupt, and fraudulent service providers. The ones that don't follow the rules and drain the lifeblood from our economy. I will fight for pro-community, pro-worker legislation like the Arizona First Procurement Act https://www.slawsonforazdistrict19.org/legislation-proposals/arizona-first-procurement-act, which stops taxpayer-funded profiteering. It caps contractor profit at 5 times the median worker wage, requires full-time hours by default (part-time only if the worker chooses), bans ghost jobs and fake postings, requires specific rejection reasons, prevents bad faith underbidding, gives workers a private right of action, and imposes audits, criminal penalties (class 2 felony), racketeering charges (class 3 felony), and automatic debarment for fraud. The slop trough is closed. Companies get a finder's fee for bringing workers to state projects, and those who do the work get paid the wages—no more lavish gifts of 15–20% of a project's price going to shareholders and executives who aren't actually providing the value.

I will fight to end this preying upon the vulnerable and our communities. And I will fight the intentionally inflicted poverty that is destroying our society and making our people dependent on an increasingly fickle, cruel, and unstable government and their corporate puppet-masters.