Mother Jones had an interesting article about Ken Connor, the conservative Christian Republican who testified in support of a bill that would ban the use of mandatory binding arbitration clauses in nursing home contracts. Most nursing homes today, as a condition of admission, force vulnerable elderly people to waive their right to a jury trial. Instead, they must take any complaints about neglect or abuse to a private arbitrator, chosen and paid by the nursing home, in secret proceedings where awards are much lower. The arbitration agreements are often buried in a stack of complicated paperwork, where in some cases, they have been signed by blind people and those suffering from Alzheimer's.
The nursing home arbitration bill should pass overwhelmingly. That's why Republicans really, really don't want to vote for the nursing home bill, and one reason Connor's advocacy is making them squirm. Connor sues nursing homes for a living. Just last month, Connor won a $2 million verdict against Sunrise Senior Living in California for failing to prevent and care for an elderly woman's fatal bedsores. . As such, Republicans would love to dismiss Connor as just another greedy trial lawyer. But Connor's religious-right bona fides simply make that impossible.
For three years, Connor served as the president of the Family Research Council, a leading social conservative outfit, and became a rock star among the GOP’s evangelical wing when he went to work in 2004 for then-Governor Jeb Bush to defend a Florida law that would have prevented doctors from removing Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. For Republican legislators, Connor has moral authority. He also gives money to many of them, so Republicans have to tolerate him, even as he forces them into a corner where they have to chose between devotion to industry and devotion to God and life.
While the GOP views trial lawyers as its mortal enemies, Connor doesn't see any contradiction between his profession and role as family values crusader. Instead, he sees his lawsuits against nursing homes as an extension of the work he did in the Schiavo case. "Removing the feeding tube, letting Teri Schiavo starve to death," he said in an interview, "I see this all the time with the elderly." Connor believes that the frail elderly are second only to the unborn in their suffering due to what he sees as a prevailing "quality of life" mindset, as opposed to one focused on the sanctity of life. He says he's witnessed bioethicists in Florida argue that if an elderly person suffers from dementia, there would be nothing wrong with hastening his or her demise. "If you call yourself a Christian, you have an obligation to fight for social justice," he says, noting that, "It's much easier to make the case for the elderly than for the unborn."
He testified about some of his experiences with nursing homes: "All too often, the story is the same: avoidable pressure ulcers (bed sores) penetrating to the bone; wounds with dirty bandages that are infected and foul smelling; patients languishing in urine and feces for hours on end; hollow-eyed residents suffering from avoidable malnutrition, unable to ask for help because their tongues are parched and swollen from preventable dehydration; dirty catheters clogged with crystalline sediment and yellow-green urine in the bag."
He described a nursing home industry that routinely faked medical records and staffing documentation to cover up for its shoddy treatment of its frail residents. And while Connor invoked the standard trial lawyer arguments about the need to keep the courthouse open to those who've suffered at the hands of heartless corporations, he did it in distinctly evangelical language. "Our society,” he said, “is rapidly embracing a quality-of-life ethic in the place of a sanctity-of-life ethic. But, old people do not score well using quality of life calculus and they perform poorly on functional capacity studies. They cost more to maintain than they produce and they are vulnerable to abuse and neglect by unscrupulous nursing home operators who are willing to put profits over people."
Gavin Gadberry, a lawyer from Texas who defends nursing homes for insurance companies, testified against the bill. The Republicans couldn't have picked a smarmier witness to support the nursing home industry's position. Compared with Gadberry, Connor sounded like Jesus Christ himself.
As the lobbyist for the Texas nursing home industry, Gadberry represents some of the nation's worst nursing homes. A 2002 study by the House Committee on Government Reform found that nearly 40 percent of Texas nursing homes had violations of federal regulations that caused harm to nursing-home residents or placed them at risk of serious injury or death. More than 90 percent didn't meet federal staffing standards. Rather than fix the nursing homes, at the urging of the industry (represented by Gadberry), Texas essentially got rid of the lawsuits with a 2003 tort reform measure that makes it virtually impossible to sue a nursing home on behalf of an elderly person today.
All of which made Gadberry's claim that Connor's anecdotes were rare events dubious at best. He insisted that arbitration is "more efficient" than traditional litigation and that the pending bill would "discriminate" against the industry. But Connor fired back: "The nursing homes that are providing good care don't need pre-dispute binding arbitration." Gadberry's suggestion that arbitration was a benefit to elderly nursing home residents didn't go down well with the committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Linda Sanchez, a Democrat from California, whose siblings, to her dismay, recently signed an arbitration clause to put her father into a nursing home. ("God forbid anything should happen," she said after the hearing.)
Connor thinks the Republicans' performance on the issue illustrates what’s wrong with his party these days. "[Republicans] failure to support this is, in my judgment, a failure of first principles," he said in an interview after the hearing. He noted that “Republicans would be the first to say we should hold the welfare queen responsible," but they never hold corporations to the same standards. "Protecting wrongdoing has become what our party is all about,” Connor added. “And they wonder why they're getting their clocks cleaned on the electoral map. The hypocrisy is breathtaking."
