The following is a comment from Martin J. Solomon in response to Howard Fischer’s Capitol Media Services / Arizona Daily Star report, “Report: Arizona Medical Board’s slow response endangers patients,” published September 2, 2026.
The Auditor General’s report on the Arizona Medical Board is not a surprise. It is a confession that has been waiting since 1981.
Arizona licenses more than 35,000 physicians and about 5,600 physician assistants. Families are told those licenses mean something. The board is paid fees to police unprofessional conduct: sexual misconduct, substance abuse, and quality-of-care failures that include prescribing that resulted in death.
Those are Priority 1 cases. The audit says the board still cannot close most complaints, including those, within six months. One doctor kept practicing more than three years while the file sat. A radiologist case took 1,653 days.
That is not a staffing hiccup. That is a decision to leave patients in the room with a licensee the state already had reason to investigate.
The Legislature made it worse. The board is fee-funded. It exists to protect the public, not to pad the general fund. Lawmakers still raised the skim from 10 percent to 15 percent through 2028, and they transferred $9.3 million from the board’s own fund to balance the 2025 budget. They took money collected to discipline doctors and used it as a budget patch. That is a trade: the health, welfare, and safety of Arizona patients for a cleaner spreadsheet.
Nursing-home residents live or die on the decisions of attending physicians and medical directors. When those doctors fail, the last backstop is supposed to be the Medical Board. A board that cannot finish a death-level complaint in six months is not a backstop. It is paperwork theater. Arizona government has failed the resident and the family by refusing to take timely, meaningful action to ensure competent care and to punish those who harm patients.
Raquel Rivera says the 180-day standard is outdated because the licensee population grew. Volume is not an excuse to keep a dangerous practitioner in the building. If the caseload grew six-fold, the answer is to let the board spend the fees already paid for protection, hire the investigators, and close the Priority 1 files. It is not to lower the clock and raid the till.
The public does not need another audit in 2030 that says the same thing. It needs a board that holds physicians and physician assistants accountable before the next preventable harm, and a Legislature that stops treating patient safety as spare change.
Martin J. Solomon
Solomon & Relihan
Phoenix