They work to influence legislation. They keep their funding secret. Who is New Mexico Safety Over Profit?

As lawmakers meet in the Roundhouse for the 2025 legislative session, New Mexico continues to stare down a health care crisis that risks the well-being — sometimes even the lives — of many of its residents.

The state is facing a cavernous physician shortage that has already left people in some areas without doctors, particularly those needing specialized medical care. Taxes on medical services, high Medicaid populations coupled with low reimbursement rates and a growing presence of private equity in the state’s health care system are straining both the quality and quantity of care available to New Mexico patients. Meanwhile, hospitals across the state face crippling malpractice insurance premiums that could force them to close their doors if prices continue to rise at their current rate, threatening to leave large swaths of New Mexico without any medical care at all.

Several bills have been introduced in an attempt to address the crisis, some focusing on setting hospital staffing ratios and others raising Medicaid reimbursements or attempting to lower malpractice insurance costs — and as these bills wind their way through the legislature, one group has surfaced to lobby for a very specific set of interests.

In email campaigns, press conferences and town hall meetings, in op-eds and paid newspaper advertisements, the group has suggested, without providing evidence, that proposals to address the health care crisis by limiting medical malpractice payouts are plots from rich corporations and insurance companies. They’ve expressed adamant opposition to a proposal that would limit attorney’s fees and make other changes to the state’s medical malpractice law, which currently allows for unlimited punitive damages — factors that doctors, hospitals, insurance groups and others say have contributed to astronomical malpractice payouts and skyrocketing insurance costs. They argue that such changes would harm patients and make already laborious lawsuit processes even more difficult. 

The group has published and circulated its own study, which, among other things, questions the severity of the state’s doctor shortage and claims that hospitals’ malpractice costs have not increased in recent years — sometimes misrepresenting the data and reports it draws from to support its conclusions.

And they won’t tell you who’s behind their efforts.

Secret spending

The group, a 501(c)(4) called New Mexico Safety Over Profit, has no paid staff, according to its most recent filing with the Internal Revenue Service. It does not disclose the names of the people who researched and wrote the study, titled “The Healthcare Crisis: Solutions Driven by New Mexico Patients.” Nor will it provide the names of any of the thousands of people it says have joined what their website calls a “fight for legislation” against big corporations and monied interests.

This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Notably, the group does not disclose the source of its finances — opting instead to carry out a secretly funded campaign to influence legislation on a set of issues that touches the lives of practically every New Mexican.

Dark money is ingrained in today’s political culture. It has come to permeate national politics since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which opened the doors to unlimited spending by corporations, unions and other groups in elections.

At the same time, the use of dark money has seeped deeply into state-level politics, where such spending can often exert even more influence. Nonprofit 501(c)(4) groups, which are not legally required to disclose their funding, are frequently used to hide the sources of money meant to influence policy, transparency advocates say.

“Any time you have a group, or individuals who are trying to influence public policy and are essentially refusing to make their identity known, it’s not good for democracy,” said Brendan J. Glavin, Director of Insights for Open Secrets, a group that monitors money in politics. “It’s not good for citizens to not know who the ones are who are influencing the decision-makers.”

Often, Glavin said, the use of 501(c)(4) nonprofits is “not just about obscuring the donors, but also it’s for creating a group that is not officially attached to something that people would recognize,” lending a veneer of independence and impartiality to an effort actually being steered by outside actors.

Safety Over Profit maintains that they are an independent grassroots organization, and are keeping the sources of their funding confidential to protect the safety and privacy of their donors, who they say could be targeted by “corporate interests.” When asked, the group also declined to provide the names of any of the thousands of members of what it calls its “network of individuals and families harmed by big corporations, institutions and profit-driven systems.”

“We are a 501(c)(4) organization, a nonprofit that does not have to disclose our donors,” executive director Jon Lipshutz said in an interview. “We certainly will not be disclosing our donors, nor do we have to.”

According to Safety Over Profit’s most recent IRS filings, the organization is funded by a single, unnamed donor, to the tune of $334,000.

That funding has since expanded to include “more than a single donor,” Lipshutz said.

“We have complied in every way with the law,” Lipshutz said. “We do not have any kind of hidden agenda. We have made our agenda crystal clear. We are here to advocate for the people.”

High stakes

Part of the dynamic at play today can be traced back to 2021, when Daymon Ely, an attorney and current Safety Over Profit board member who was then serving as a Democratic state lawmaker, introduced a bill dramatically raising New Mexico’s existing caps on malpractice damages for hospitals, from $600,000 to more than $6 million over a five-year period. The bill did not cap punitive damages, which can drive payouts much higher.

The move was necessary, proponents said, in part because the previous caps — which had not been updated for decades — were often woefully inadequate to compensate patients harmed by medical malpractice.

In the years since, however, many insurers have stopped offering malpractice coverage in New Mexico. Those who remain have repeatedly raised their premiums on many healthcare providers, driven by what they say is an unusually high risk of malpractice lawsuits. 

New Mexico’s rapid increase in caps “really kind of threw a wrench in the whole market,” said Mike Stinson, Vice President of Public Policy and Legal Affairs at the Medical Professional Liability Association, an insurance trade group. “Suddenly folks were seeing the risk increase exponentially. As that risk changes, the premiums will change accordingly.”

Premiums for some hospitals — especially county-owned hospitals serving rural populations — have risen so dramatically that they could be unable to make their insurance payments if prices continue to increase as they have since 2021. Should that happen, huge swaths of the state would be left without access to local health care. 

The problem has become so dire that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham singled out malpractice insurance costs as one of the most pressing problems facing New Mexico in her State of the State Address, given on the opening day of the 2025 legislative session.

“Health care leaders are clear that the high cost of medical malpractice insurance is the barrier to recruiting and retaining the providers we need,” Lujan Grisham said. “Insurance rates for doctors and health care providers shouldn’t be any higher in New Mexico than in neighboring states, and they most certainly shouldn’t be twice the national average.”

Attorneys, though, say that focusing on malpractice suits as a driver of runaway insurance costs misses the real cause of the crisis: the growing number of hospitals and clinics owned by private equity firms, a type of investment group that acquires controlling stakes in companies in order to later sell them at a profit. Once hospitals are in the hands of private equity, they often implement cost-cutting measures and have been shown to disproportionately injure patients. After a number of years of cost-cutting, the firms often sell the hospitals, leaving the facilities in poor shape and taking their earnings out of state. 

Seventeen of New Mexico’s more than 40 hospitals are owned by private equity, the highest proportion in the country. 

“We have a situation where corporate, profit-driven medicine is squeezing doctors and cutting corners to make more money,” said Kathy Love, an Albuquerque-based attorney who formerly served as president of the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association. 

Malpractice lawsuits are the only tool citizens have to hold these providers accountable when they put patients at risk, Love added. “Capping or limiting a jury’s ability to give justice to patients who are harmed by corporate medicine is a bad strategy.” And capping the fees attorneys receive for these suits — which can take years of work, and only result in a payout for lawyers if the case is settled or succeeds in court — could disincentivize firms from taking on malpractice cases, she said.

Those views are echoed in a Nov. 2024 report issued by Safety Over Profit, which also points to private equity as the main source of the state’s malpractice woes. 

The report’s policy recommendations include stopping proposals to limit attorney’s fees and tighten caps on punitive damages, as well as opposing “venue restrictions” — which refers to a rule allowing lawsuits to be brought outside the area where an incident occurred. (Critics have decried this practice as “venue shopping” for juries more likely to award large judgments; attorneys say it ensures access to fair juries, especially in small communities where hospitals are sometimes the largest employer.)

In several significant instances, the report mischaracterizes the studies and documents it cites to support its findings.

One prominent example is the report’s assertion that the number of doctors is increasing in New Mexico. To support that claim, Safety Over Profit points to a study by the American Medical Association that does not contain any data on physician population counts — or any data specific to New Mexico at all. 

In another notable instance, the Safety Over Profit report claims that malpractice insurance rates have not increased, citing a legislative study that actually shows rates rising sharply for some types of hospitals.

Safety Over Profit declined to disclose the names of the report’s authors, saying in an email that it was compiled by “board members, volunteers, and contractors.”

A secretive network emerges

New Mexico Safety Over Profit first appeared in its current form on October 28, 2024.

The organization is not new, but instead is a rebranding of a little-known nonprofit first established four years earlier by political consultant Jon Lipshutz, who manages a strategic communications and public relations firm called Big I Strategies. According to filings with the New Mexico Secretary of State, Lipshutz incorporated the group in 2020, under the name “Fairness for New Mexico Patients.”

In the filings, Lipshutz described the organization as an effort to “advocate for policies and legislation regarding medical malpractice.” The new organization did not disclose the sources of its funding.

Asked about the nonprofit’s origins in an interview with Searchlight, Lipshutz described being “approached by a group of patients and advocates” who wanted to start a new organization to fight against corporate medicine in New Mexico. He would not name any of the patients or advocates. 

He had done similar work before, he said, and this project was a good fit. He also had a longstanding relationship with Daymon Ely, whose bill to raise malpractice caps would be a priority for Lipshutz’s new 501(c)(4) — several years earlier, Lipshutz had run Ely’s successful 2016 election campaign for Democratic state representative. 

Ely, who shares an office with Lipshutz in Albuquerque, is currently serving as Safety Over Profit’s secretary.

Lispshutz said that his work with Safety Over Profit has “nothing whatsoever to do with the law offices of Daymon Ely,” and that the two entities are entirely independent of each other. Ely did not respond to requests for comment. 

Ely, who formerly served as president of the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association, is one of several notable connections between Safety Over Profit and the state’s major civil attorney group: Another member of Safety Over Profit’s board of directors, Feliz Rael, is the Trial Lawyers Association’s current president-elect. Daniel Marzec, a spokesperson for the Trial Lawyers Association, is also handling communications for Safety Over Profit, according to emails shared with Searchlight. 

Stephanie Maez, the group’s communications contractor, said that while Safety Over Profit has no formal ties to the Trial Lawyers Association, it is working together with the trial lawyers in its legislative initiatives.

“There is collaboration happening across our organizations because we do share the same values in terms of ensuring that New Mexicans have access to justice, making sure these corporate entities are held accountable,” Maez said. “Our policy priorities are independent of the trial lawyers,” she added.