The “Dr. Ralph Heap” signs scattered across Arizona have become a problem for the Republican Corporation Commission candidate.
The Citizens’ Clean Elections Commission is investigating allegations that Heap failed to report spending on his campaign signs, potentially violating the public financing rules he agreed to follow.
But the “Dr.” title printed across them recalls another chapter of Heap’s history with state regulators — and that this isn’t the first time he’s had a run-in with them.
Heap, a state lawmaker who previously ran a 40-year orthopedic practice, was reprimanded by the Arizona Medical Board in 2023 after settling a lawsuit alleging he botched a patient’s hip replacement.
“What really separates me from other doctors is that I just really enjoy taking care of the patients,” Heap said in this promo video the Steward Health Care System posted on Aug. 11, 2020.
While a spot on the state’s utility regulating board doesn’t call for medical experience, Heap has made his medical career part of his pitch to Corporation Commission voters, including on campaign signs that prominently identify him as a doctor.
And as a state lawmaker, he has tried to shape health policy, including legislation affecting the same medical board that disciplined him.
The board’s reprimand centers on a hip replacement Heap performed in 2016 and says Heap waited too long to check on the patient afterward, allowing for the possibility that a serious complication could go unnoticed.
Before the board action, a former patient of Heap’s — we’ll call her Jane, since she’s a private citizen and not running for public office — sued Heap and his medical practice in 2018, alleging that surgery left her with permanent injuries.
Heap and his co-defendants, including the medical group that employed him, denied that Heap was responsible for her injuries and settled the case in 2021.
And because Jane’s case settled before trial, a court never decided whether Heap negligently caused her injuries. The settlement amount isn’t disclosed in the court filings we reviewed.
But Arizona law requires medical malpractice settlements to be reported to the state medical board. And in 2023, the board found Heap violated state laws governing “unprofessional conduct” for medical providers.
“(Heap) deviated from the standard of care by failing to timely perform a post-operative examination,” the letter of reprimand says. “There was potential for patient harm in that (Heap) risked delay in diagnosis of a possible hematoma (collection of blood).”
Unlike his ongoing battle with the Clean Elections Commission, Heap didn’t contest the medical board’s findings.
He signed a consent agreement accepting the reprimand and waiving his right to challenge the order. The result was a disciplinary mark on his record and a report to the National Practitioner Data Bank.
The allegations in the separate medical malpractice lawsuit suggest Heap’s former patient experienced severe consequences after the surgery.
Jane’s attorneys said she visited Heap in 2016, after she fell from a horse and injured her right hip. After the initial course of treatment didn’t work, Jane scheduled a total right hip replacement surgery.
"The anticipated 90 minute surgery took nearly three hours, and resulted in significant, permanent injury to (Jane’s) sciatic nerve, as well as acute blood loss requiring two units of blood transfusion,” the civil suit complaint alleges.
Her attorneys alleged Heap struggled inserting the metal hip, causing the injury he later diagnosed as sciatic nerve palsy.
The medical board’s reprimand focused on what happened next.
While another doctor documented numbness in Jane’s foot about five hours after the surgery, Heap didn’t examine her until the next day, per the medical board’s letter of reprimand.
That, the board concluded, meant that Heap “deviated from the standard of care by failing to timely perform a post-operative examination.”
Heap’s attorneys denied that he caused the sciatic nerve injury — which meant muscles in her leg and foot were not receiving normal signals from the nerve — but acknowledged the unusually long surgery and blood loss.
Three months after the surgery, “feeling extremely depressed and hopeless, (Jane) intentionally overdosed on her pain medication in an attempt to kill herself,” per court documents.
A doctor in the House
Before it expired in December, Heap last renewed his medical license in September 2023, per the medical board’s licensing database.
About five months later, he filed a statement of interest to run for the LD10 House seat being vacated by his son, Justin Heap, who went on to win the Maricopa County recorder’s race.
He introduced himself to voters as a “physician/orthopedic surgeon for 40 years” in the 2024 Clean Elections candidate guide, and won a House seat in the conservative, Mesa-area district.
Heap also enjoys “triathlons, astronomy, and playing in a bluegrass band,” he wrote in the candidate guide. Specifically, the Red Mountain Bluegrass Band, where Heap plays banjo alongside what appears to be a small dynasty of fellow Heaps. (Photo from the Red Mountain Bluegrass Band’s November 19, 2010, Facebook post.)
Heap made one previous run for the Legislature in 2014, when he challenged former Republican Sen. Bob Worsley over his support for Medicaid expansion the year prior. The Phoenix New Times reported at the time that Heap himself had received more than $130,000 in Medicaid payments from 2010 through 2013.
Heap lost the challenge, but made it to the Capitol a decade later to fill his son’s former House seat.
After taking office, Heap landed a spot as vice chair of the House Health and Human Services Committee, where many of the bills he sponsored were health-related — including a bill to make health care insurers cover prosthetic devices and another banning mRNA vaccines.
But most notably, Heap sought to place limits on the same medical board that reprimanded him two years earlier.
HB2808, which he ran in 2025, would have barred the board from forcing doctors to waive a “fundamental legal right or liberty.”
Heap said the bill was inspired by another doctor’s run-in with the medical board. The board ordered a physician to attend out-of-state training and sign a waiver giving up the right to sue if the program harmed him through negligence or improperly disclosed his private information.
After passing the House, the bill died without a Senate hearing.
“I don't think this board — or any board, really — has the ability to take away our basic fundamental rights without a pretty compelling reason to do so,” Heap told his House colleagues.
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A group called the Republican Party of Arizona Latinos is promoting an event in which voters are invited to “meet the CANDIDATES WIVES.”
The Chandler event, which is scheduled for Sept. 29, will feature “honest connection with the candidate’s wives,” which as far as we can tell is a grammatical error and not a reference to one candidate with many wives. But then again, we’re not sure.
Either way, the flyer’s image of a rather curvy AI-generated woman in a red dress and the hilariously sexist title and premise of the event had us cracking up.
There won’t be any “political buzzwords” at the event either, the tweet notes.
Don't worry, ladies — the wives will explain all the political stuff super simply.