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| Prisons can't contain rising medical costs |
| By hutchnews.com |
| Published: 09/21/2009 |
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The health clinic at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility sees more than 1,000 prisoners a month for everything from minor illnesses to end-of-life care, from regular blood pressure and glucose monitoring to dental work, eye exams and psychiatric treatment. The clinic, with 75 employees, is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and can handle just about anything short of surgery and advanced life support. Inmate health care there and at similar clinics at Kansas' other prisons will cost the Kansas Department of Corrections $46.5 million in the 2009-10 fiscal year. That's up 116 percent from the $21.4 million KDOC paid in 2000. By another measure, the cost of medical care has grown from 10.3 percent of the department's total operating costs in 2000 to 17 percent today. And there are plenty of reasons to worry that the cost of inmate medical care will continue to rise, including a predicted increase in the number of inmates and a prison population that is growing older and consequently sicker. "The primary factor," Secretary of Corrections Roger Werholtz said, "is what everybody is experiencing - health care costs are just going up. Part of the reason is that what were a lot of new and experimental pharmaceuticals and procedures are no longer experimental but community standards of care now. HIV and hepatitis C were really considered terminal illnesses with very poor prognosis. Now people are being managed with those illnesses for very extended periods of time. And we are obligated to extend that care when medically indicated." Read More. |
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