Audit: Privatizing Florida’s Prison Health Care Was Costly and Deadly Mistake
When former Florida Gov. Rick Scott took office in 2011, he pushed to privatize health care for Florida prisoners. He promised the move would save taxpayers millions of dollars and it did, at least until 2014. An audit ordered by the state legislature found that since those initial savings, privatization has cost many millions more.
“The contracts the [Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC)] entered into between 2012 and 2015, while they saved substantial amounts of money, resulted in substantial reductions in service,” said Karl Becker, senior vice president at CGL Companies and one of the audit’s authors. “Those savings you achieved during that time, you are probably paying for now” through lawsuits and increased costs.
FDOC was the subject of a class-action lawsuit that challenged the conditions of confinement, and the provision of medical care was a large feature of that suit. It took a while, but FDOC turned things around and had in place a very adequate medical system. Then Scott, the former CEO of Columbia/HCA, a giant health care company that was fined $1.7 billion for defrauding Medicare and Medicaid while Scott was in charge, became Florida’s governor. His agenda was to privatize as much of government as possible, arguing it would achieve savings and upgrade services.
With a prison system that holds about 100,000 prisoners and a $2.2 billion budget, lawmakers were game to privatization. Yet the move to was puzzling for FDOC, at the legislature’s direction, had attempted from 2001 to 2006 to privatize its Region 4 health care. That effort with Wexford Health Sources failed due to the usual issues with privatization: “reductions in staffing, dramatic decreases in episodes of outside care, and the number of prisoner grievances about the poor quality of health service care,” according to the audit.
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This mess has been going on for a long time. When I was at WCI the PA there REFUSED to prescribe to me or allow me to obtain from the VA the medications They had me taking for over a decade for my Service Connected injuries because, to quote her, “I don’t want to, it’s too much paperwork and not in my budget”. Needless to say, when I filed the grievance, she denied saying it, and still wouldn’t order them for me.
Having spent four years in DC representing the fleet I came to see just how bureaucrats operate. They are perfectly ready to take credit for anything that goes right whether they are deserving or not, and will run like rats when something goes wrong. Their responsibilities and obligations are treated as something attended to when convenient and when not convenient they will look for every excuse under the sun to justify their ‘no-nothing’ attitude. This is pronounced especially when they are dealing with sub-humans…those who are incarcerated.