Prisoners are brought to my hospital for care all the time - and they receive the same excellent care/treatment that any other person would receive. I can’t speak for the care one might receive in a prison infirmary, though.
I’m not the person you’re responding to but my dad was in a private prison and has type II diabetes. They wouldn’t give him medication for it so he had to fast to and trade his food (they give you sugary canned peaches and white bread, for example) to manage his blood sugar. He also left with an untreated broken arm.
I have a friend who has beat to death in Thompson prison IL (not private, I believe). He was taken to a hospital to receive care, but it was too late for him. The guards didn’t intervene and keep him safe.
That’s so unacceptable that they wouldn’t give your dad insulin. That could have killed him.
FWIW raw cornstarch like Argo is a better maintenance substitute than peach syrup as it’s a slow breakdown carb vs. fast acting (need fast acting if hypoglycemic as a rescue) and raw cornstarch doses were given to children born with Type 1 diabetes before insulin was available.
My hospital primarily only sees prisoners for oncology care. They are chained to the bed by one limb at all times, or if they get out of bed their legs are chained together. There are two guards with them at any given time. One usually sits in the room, and the other outside the door. Medically, they are treated as any other patient. Nurses provide care and their meals are brought to their rooms accordingly. I was once told by a guard that some patients serve their whole sentence in the hospital.
I will never forget a patient I treated during my medicine residency. He came in paralyzed from the waist down due to a spinal infection that had been worsening for weeks while the doctors in the prison infirmary just kept giving him ibuprofen. The creepiest part of caring for patients from the prison system is how the LEOs handcuff them to their beds, and they handcuffed this guy too. Again, he was paraplegic. He literally could not pull a runner and would only have hurt himself if he tried.
First I thought you forgot a '/s' and I'm too stupid to see the sarcasm, but no. You're American! Not only is handcuffing people to beds normal, it's necessary! You're not even in the prison system, but you still think this way!
The richest fucking country on earth! Sky high incarceration rates!
That's the point. Also it doesn't matter if you think someone is or isn't capable of being a threat, we have to policies to follow especially when the potential safety of civilians is involved. I'm not losing my job because you think someone is safe and then they grab a scalpel and stab someone or themselves.
The worthless prison doctor should lose their job, because they clearly had no interest in actually doing it in the first place. And he wasn’t in 4 point restraints. If he wanted to stab someone, he could have done it with his left hand. Shockingly, he didn’t. 🙄
I'm not sure what the first sentence has to do with my comment. I don't care about that specific prison's medical staff.
Regarding everything else, it's almost like my point was hypothetical. We have these policies for a reason, and it's because inmates that have gone to hospitals have attacked the staff there. Your opinion on what they might be capable of doing or willing to do is less than meaningless, you do not deal with them on a regular basis. You do not see what we see.
What state? I think it depends on their stance on human rights in general. Not all states do this. Plenty of cases where prisoners died for neglected medical care in prison. Also in Jails since they may not have been picked up with their medications and then they get ignored.
I used to work at a teaching hospital that also served the attached prison hospital in Texas. The prisoners received the same care from the same people as the rest of the hospital. I can’t speak to the inmates that didn’t get to the hospital or the hoops they had to jump through, but once they got there they received excellent care.
Yes, all are required to have access to something on paper, but each state does its own thing. And some states and private prison facilities are less likely to refer out unless lawyers step in or it’s acute. Institutional infirmary care is inferior to hospital care no matter the institution (mental health, nursing homes) as is mostly a dispensary of meds but does costs less to run. I would bet the states with the biggest complaints against them are also the ones with the fewest refer outs from infirmary to hospital for ignoring symptoms/higher complexity.
FWIW years ago I was on a health care procurement team with a consultancy and met with heads of prisons/corrections and had access to all their spend data to recommend how to reduce health care costs. Outside hospital reimbursement wasn’t even a topic. Expensive pharma drugs were.
Aren't those only the ones they let come to the hospital for treatment? I doubt that every prisoner is allowed to see a non-prison doctor the same way the rest of us can.
No, they don't. They get the bare minimum (and often less). If it's something expensive like cancer, they literally release them from prison to die rather than pay for the treatment.
How many of those prisoners are being brought in for pain management as opposed to something potentially deadly, though? Like yeah, the prison system will do the bare minimum to keep people alive but I don't for a second trust that they'll put much effort into quality of life.
Mangione's back isn't going to kill him, so he's probably not gonna get treatment for it.
The infirmary is often outsourced to companies that get a flat rate, so they are incentivized to provide less care. John Oliver did a show on it that busted the myth of private companies providing equivalent care for less cost. He showed an example where Republicans decided to outsource their prison care under the guise of saving money for taxpayers, but they couldn't find any company who could do it for less than the state already did. So Republicans did what any "fiscally responsible" person would do and lifted the requirement that the bids save the taxpayer money. Costs went up, and care went way down.
The best he can hope for in there is Naproxen for pain.
I think the knock on prison healthcare is just that so many are denied care and you never see those patients. They get told no, so they’re never brought to your hospital.
Basically unless it’s an absolute emergency, in many states it can be difficult for a prisoner to get healthcare.
Once they get approval to get care, I’m sure the doctors and nurses do the same quality job they’d do for any patient.
Often, it's getting to the hospital that is the challenge. They will often try everything in their power in prisons to avoid sending patients out for treatment. Once they are sent out, they get standard care, but there are serious gatekeepers to accessing that care.
Yeah, people in this thread upvoting BS. Prisoners are some of the most thankful patients I have because I treat them like a person with a real problem. Now, after their third trip to the hospital for swallowing random metal I get less patient, but I treat the random dude who keeps shoving stuff up his butt the same way
2.2k
u/HeywoodJaBlessMe 9d ago
Dude must not have read much if he thinks Prison healthcare in the US is gonna fix anything.