Mitch PerryOn Friday, Department of Corrections Secretary Julie Jones announced that the five-year contracts with private health care providers Corizon and Wexford Health Sources will be canceled and renegotiated, in response to the overwhelming evidence of poor care that those providers have been giving to inmates in Florida state prisons, including a decade high number of monthly death counts.
Although the Miami Herald and The Palm Beach Post, in particular, have done groundbreaking work on this story, I personally learned a lot about the crisis first-hand in a report I wrote this past summer regarding the plight of Tampa native Anthony Carvajal for Creative Loafing.
Carvajal slipped and fell while on work release two years ago, resulting in a lump on his spine. His complaints of pain were ignored for months before it was revealed he had multiple myeloma.
There have been serious issues with Corizon for years leading up to the Department of Corrections authorizing it to take over all health services for the DOC in the northern part of Florida two years ago, issues such as that the company had been sued more than 600 times for malpractice in the previous five years.
Testifying before the Senate Criminal Justice Committee a few weeks ago, Jones said that, “The standard of healthcare with our current providers is not at the level that is required by the contracts,” but added that the contracts include no penalties for violating medical standards or failing to provide adequate medical care. “We are working very diligently with those contracts to bring the standard of care up to the level that is in those contracts,” she said.
Now she is ripping up those contracts and asking both companies to rebid to take over health care.
Though the move is long overdue, Jones said she is still determined to keep prison health care privatized, which leads to the question of whether the situation will improve anytime soon. Rick Scott made privatized prison health care a campaign pledge when he ran for office in 2010, and apparently the state is determined to keep it that way, evidence to the contrary be damned.
The fact is (as we well know), health care costs rise to some degree every year, regardless of the policy. So to guarantee that you can save money for the state on something like health care is somewhat dangerous, since cutting costs generally means cutting services. The number of deaths this past year seem to bear that out.
Here are the conditions that Jones says must be met to successfully become a provider for the DOC:
•The ability to ensure that appropriate staffing is provided to enable:
•A proper mix of administrative and institutional-level direct care;•The presence of medical staff who possess the proper skills and qualifications to provide quality care to our inmate population, and;
•Clinical oversight and supervision;
•The ability to define expectations and best practices for utilization management and specialized care delivery;
•Access to specialized resources and expertise to provide services to inmates in inpatient mental health units and special housing;
•Implementation of electronic health records to support decision making and improve the provision of comprehensive medical, dental and mental health services while ensuring a continuity of care;
•Improved coordination of medical and mental health re-entry planning;
•The ability to define performance expectations and consequences for non-performance.
