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| Inmate health care costs could increase by 60 percent |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 06/06/2005 |
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Because of new, expensive treatments for AIDS and hepatitis C and the need for more staff, the cost of providing medical care to inmates in Maryland could increase by 60 percent, state officials said. The Board of Public Works approved an increase in spending that could push the annual health care cost for inmates to $110 million for the state's 27,000 prisoners. "We are required to give adequate care," Mary Ann Saar, secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, told the board members: Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., Comptroller William Donald Schaefer and Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp. Contracts were awarded to five for-profit companies, which will run different parts of the prisons' privatized health care system, such as medical, mental health and pharmaceutical services. Last year, the state spent $68 million on inmate health care, state corrections officials said. Schaefer, the former governor, remarked, "It's a shame to pay $100 million for people who go out and rape and kill ... and there are (law-abiding) people who don't have any medical care at all." Correctional Medical Services Inc. of St. Louis won the biggest contract, a two-year, $125.6 million deal that involves providing medical services to state prisons and Baltimore's state-run jail facilities - a total of 32 facilities. Under a state contract signed in 2000, the company has provided comprehensive medical care services for the past five years to three prisons in Hagerstown. The state's main prison health care contractor since 2000, Prison Health Services Inc. of Brentwood, Tenn., did not win any piece of the state's business in the latest round of bidding. Prison Health, which provided health care services to more than 20 state correctional facilities, had been criticized by inmate advocacy groups for skimping on services, particularly in Baltimore's jails. Officials with Prison Health, a subsidiary of publicly traded America Service Group Inc., said the company lost a total of $14 million in Maryland, mostly over the past year, as skyrocketing medical expenses outpaced the fixed amount of revenues it received from its state contract. But the company has strongly denied that its financial losses led it to cut its services to inmates. |
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