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| Report blasts CA healthcare |
| By The Sacramento Bee |
| Published: 07/06/2006 |
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SAN FRANCISCO, CA - An expensive, state-of-the-art X-ray unit has been sitting in storage since it was delivered to San Quentin State Prison two years ago "because the room in which it was to be installed couldn't bear the weight," the court-appointed receiver who runs California's prison health care system told a federal judge Wednesday. Robert Sillen's first bimonthly report to U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, who appointed him to bring the prisons into compliance with constitutional requirements for humane health care, described other examples of waste he's encountered, including up to $80 million in unnecessary payments for pharmacy drugs last year. Blaming "bureaucratic paralysis" and other factors, the report said that "almost every necessary element of a working medical care system" is either nonexistent or "in abject disrepair." The report cited prison overcrowding as another major source of health care problems. But Sillen said in an interview Wednesday that building two new prisons proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would hardly make up for the expected growth in the state prison population in the next four or five years. "I don't think the state will ever be able to build themselves out of this problem," said the receiver, who was health care chief in Santa Clara County before he took his present job in April. With most prisons now at 200 percent of inmate capacity, Sillen said an effective solution to overcrowding would require changes in sentencing and parole policies to reduce the number of prisoners. Schwarzenegger recently has proposed transferring nonviolent female prisoners to community correctional facilities. But the governor has opposed measures that would soften the state's three-strikes law, and he has vetoed about two-thirds of the releases approved by the parole board. Sillen, who on Wednesday announced a 90-day crash program to improve health care at San Quentin, said he and his staff "can do an enormous amount" to change medical conditions throughout the prisons because they don't have to function within the political system. He said he didn't know yet whether he would ask Henderson to sidestep the bureaucracy -- by waiving hiring rules, for example, or seizing state funds to pay clinical personnel. "If it takes a court order, I will seek a court order," he said. |
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