Health care for prisoners
I just finished reading an editorial in Reader’s Digest (don’t ask) calling for discriminating against prisoners when it comes to health care. For example, dropping them to the bottom of the list for life-saving treatment or denying them necessary but expensive health care. I strongly disagree with this. I feel that our criminal justice system has to account for the possibility that it might be wrong.
A person who is wrongfully imprisoned, or who is imprisoned for a crime that should not be a crime, no longer has the opportunity to get their own health care. For many prisoners, health care has been taken away from them because they were taken away from a productive job which gave them access to health care. It’s bad enough to jail someone for being black, or hispanic, or for smoking pot, but to take away their job and then sit back and watch them die or watch temporary disabilities become permanent? Denying health care to people we are responsible for is, as the Supreme Court has ruled, cruel and unusual.
If we don’t want to be responsible for them, we should not be putting them in prison.
A construction worker who gets ten years for smoking pot doesn’t deserve that ten years to become a life sentence just because we took away their health insurance. A college graduate who is implicated solely on the testimony of an unreliable informant deserves the health care that they would have received had they gone on to become a productive member of society.
Frankly, I think we need to consider extending health care to the families of prisoners. We would have to face up to the fact that when we jail people for breaking stupid laws we are costing society its health, and we are ruining real lives. I agree that with the huge number of people we put into jail it isn’t worth it. The solution is not to kill people for violating bad laws, it is to repeal the bad laws and not put them in jail in the first place.
But the bottom line is that our legal system can, sometimes, imprison people who should not be imprisoned. Denying or delaying health care because “they don’t deserve it” is wrong, and ensures that legal mistakes become deadly mistakes.
- February 27, 2005: Private Health Care in Jails Can Be a Death Sentence
-
I haven’t read it, because I don’t register with the New York Times (also, I’m in a hotel room stealing somebody else’s wireless and wouldn’t want to send passwords through their “warroom” in any case), but Paul von Zielbauer is apparently taking on health care in jails.
Good, because this is important. But I have a suspicion from the title that he’s specifically blaming private health care instead of the fact that we just don’t care about health care in prisons and we tend to hire monopolies instead of promoting competition where it counts: making sick people healthy. But at least someone is paying attention.
Amygdala tends to confirm my suspicions, though it may be their own private (pun intended) spin.
This is not a matter of public vs. private systems. A purely state-run health care system would be just as bad, or worse: more prone to political expediencies, more worries about giving “too much” health care to murderers, etc. But as long as there is still the possibility that we have imprisoned people for crimes that they did not commit, and as long as we continue to imprison people for crimes that should not be crimes, prison health care must be at least as good as health care outside of prisons. In my opinion, it should be the same health care as is available outside of prisons.
- ACLU: Medical Care for Prisoners
- “Deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners constitutes the ‘unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain’ proscribed by the Eighth Amendment.”
- FAMM: Lonnie Lundy
- Lonnie Lundy’s conviction “was based almost entirely on the testimony of one co-defendant, who came forward a month later to say that the prosecutor's office had tricked, coerced, and threatened him into fabricating the story.”
- FAMM: Lamont & Lawrence Garrison
- ”There were no drugs, drug paraphernalia, or other evidence of drugs found on the Garrisons or in their house. There was never any record at all of them selling drugs, other than testimonies from the known and now-convicted drug dealers” who received years off of their sentence just for naming names that might or might not be valid.
More reigning in bad laws
- A customer service model of federal spending
- “If we can put a moon on the man, why cannot we devise a system whereby every state is billed by DC annually, and let the states compete for citizens to pay the taxes?” Moving from a system where the federal government taxes individuals to one where the federal government taxes state governments makes all of our lives a lot simpler and solves a lot of thorny civil rights issues as well.
- Wachovia fines encourage drug trafficking
- Some people are wondering why no one at Wachovia went to jail for money laundering. The authorities received 160 million dollars in forfeiture and fines. Why would they want to discourage future banks from acting as Wachovia did?
- Don’t mess with the deck chairs, fix the boat!
- Advice for the incoming House. Make them deny it! And don’t try to fool us by changing the deck chairs.
- Justice conjured is justice denied
- Blunting criticism of bad laws by exempting nice people.
- Has welfare failed us?
- Has welfare failed us, or have we overwhelmed the welfare system through other policies that encourage dependance and discourage economic development?
- 13 more pages with the topic reigning in bad laws, and other related pages
More health care
- Health care reform: walking into quicksand
- The first step, when you walk into quicksand, is to walk back out. Health providers today are in the business of dealing with human resources departments and government agencies. Their customers are bureaucrats. Their best innovations will be in the fields of paperwork and red tape. If we want their innovations to be health care innovations, their customers need to be their patients.
- Robbing Peter to pay Peter… later
- Robbing from Peter to pay Paul? Government goes one better: robbing from Peter to pay Peter. As usual, Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on taxes, because Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on anything. “However legal it may be to pay what never has been lent, this style of business seems to me extremely inconvenient!”
- Keep plucking that Congress
- The more people who can afford their own health care and insurance, the easier it will be to care for the rest.
- San Francisco-style budgeting
- The health “reform” bill appears to be bringing San Francisco-style budgeting to Washington.
- Discouraging health insurance competition
- The largest problem with our current health care system is that competition is actively discouraged at every level. Rather than making that problem worse, we should be encouraging real competition among insurance providers and health care providers.
- 11 more pages with the topic health care, and other related pages
More welfare
- Everybody gets $7,000 a year
- Charles Murray argues that we can vastly reduce the cost of the welfare system and social security simply by giving everyone $7,000 a year plus a health plan.
- Social Security reform and the polls
- Republican efforts on social security reform may pay off even if polls indicate people don’t currently support reform.
- Social Security
- Just what is social security? Is it a welfare program or a pension fund, or something else we don’t understand?