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Dayton
Daily News...
Ohio’s
prisoner medical costs top $222 million
Lawsuit,
age of prisoners may have led to increase.
By Jim
Otte, WHIO-TV
Tuesday,
February 7, 2012
The cost to
Ohio for prisoner medical care last year topped $222 million, leading
state
prison officials to seek ways to bring it down.
The Ohio
Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections is under a federal class
action
lawsuit filed in 2003 to improve medical care for prisoners, and that
has led
the state to hire hundreds of medical staff and build new facilities
for
prisoner care.
In 2010,
the state paid an average of $4,371 per inmate in medical costs.
The lawsuit
was filed by Ohio prisoners and lawyers who complained that the medical
system
had been so starved for funding that the conditions were deplorable.
“People
were dying and getting a lot sicker than they should because of
inadequate
medical care,” said Rickell Howard with the Ohio Justice and Police
Center.
The state
spent $28 million on prescriptions alone and will pay to provide
medical
service through its own state-employed health care employees or, in
extreme
cases, in private hospitals. The state typically will pay 25 percent of
the
billed charges from a private medical provider.
Spending is
also up because the average age of Ohio’s prisoners is rising: 1,000
inmates
are age 65 or older.
Ricky Beers
of Springfield, 50, was incarcerated in August for one year on a charge
of
breaking and entering while he was already facing multiple medical
problems. He
entered the prison relying upon a colostomy bag and has had his spleen
removed
while in the prison system.
“It’s gone
better than I thought,” he said.
Patients
with cancer are the most costly, and some patients have cost the state
more
than $250,000 a year in medical costs.
To try to
reduce costs, the state created its own in-house lab for blood and
urine
testing and a dialysis unit for inmates.
The state
takes the extreme step of releasing a sick prisoner from custody only
in cases
in which non violent offenders are diagnosed with a terminal illness.
“There
are tough decisions to make, but there are a lot of patients here that
do not
qualify for those things,” said Stuart Hudson, chief of the corrections
department health care service.
The lawsuit
is to be reviewed by the court this summer and a determination will be
made on
whether or not to release the state’s prison medical system from court
oversight.
Read this
and other articles at the Dayton Daily News
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