House Tentatively Approves Prisoner Health Care Fee
The House today gave early approval to a bill that would require Texas prisoners to pay $100 a year for health care.
Current law requires inmates to make a copayment of $3 per doctor visit. HB 26, by state Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Plano, seeks to offset some of the prison health care costs that taxpayers now absorb by requiring inmates in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to pay an annual fee of $100 if they use prison medical services.
For inmates who are unable to pay the fee, 50 percent of money deposited into their trust fund would be ...
Comments (5)
Katie Bobatee
Nurses already distribute meds to Texas inmates. All inmates will use medical services because the state requires inmates to be screened for TB, HIV/AIDS, and hepatitis at processing. So an inmate will have to pay $100/year bc they are diabetic and need med staff to provide insulin? Bad bill.
Penny Chunn
Nurses have been delivering simple, and complex, medications since the Crimean War.
It is part of the many, many hours of the study of pharmacology.
carlo caraluzzo
I love the way the media reports stories in TDCJ. The implication that the taxpayers are paying doctors to hand out OTCs, (when the truth is that it can sometimes take a week to even see a doctor on many units) is criminal. This is the kind of verbal trickery that gets bills like this passed. We all know the members of the State Legislature in Texas are not playing with a full deck. Stories like this do not help because one of them will take it and make a speech to the public (who thinks they know) that doctors are being paid to dispense aspirin to murders and rapists just to get a few more votes.
Here is the FACTS good people of Texas. Not one inmate in Texas was sentenced to hard labor but 95% of them work at least 40 hours a week. How much does an electrician or plumber make in Texas? An apprentice will make $12 an hour, 40 hours a week, or just about $2000 a month. What do inmates get for this? They get 60 square feet of living space that they have to share with another adult (or 30 apiece-about the size of your closet at home), the guarantee that some thug in a uniform is going to come into this closet and tear it apart. They get food that homeless people would not eat. They get tormented everyday, all day long by half illiterate prison guards and in many cases denied permission to go to the pill window and even GET those pills.
So all this nonsense about inmates getting a free ride? Save it. Tell you what, if inmates are getting a free ride and are so dangerous, lets stop inmates from doing ANY work in TDCJ amd hire free world people to do all those jobs. Lets see how much you love your prison system then.
Annette Bryant
The loved ones of the inmates would have to pay this fee. Inmates sentenced to death or 35 years is just that, however; the guards take it upon themselves to punish the inmates by withholding their mail for three weeks or not giving it to them at all. Prison policy states the inmates are to receive their mail within 48 hours, even if the mailroom make copies...I to not know of any inmate that receives his mail in a timely manner. If the food makes the inmate throw-up, then he is given an unknown substance which is ground up like vomit for a week. The guards take it upon themselves to punish inmates in any manner they please and the Ombudsman's Office back up the guards every time and will write you back saying your alligations were false. This happens even when paper work is sent to prove otherwise and the inmate volunteers to pay for his own lie detective test and has three witnesses to the incident who sign their names to affidavits. These cages are 6' by 6', so if your are 6'1", you cannot stand straight up and this includes a sink and commode on Death Row at Polunsky Unit where they live for years and only get out for 1 hour a day and that is to another cage outside. I would not feed the unknown mush to my dogs!
Kim Crecca
Texas Tribune should look into the so-called medical services that inmates receive in more detail. I have actual copies of requests for medical visits that have taken up to a month for approval. Then the "doctors" that inmates visit are from foreign countries with accents so thick that inmates have trouble understanding their instructions. They also have difficulty communicating their symptoms to the doctor for treatment. In some instances, repeated visits are necessary in order to obtain the proper medication as what was ordered by the doctor at the visit is not always what is dispensed at the pill window weeks later. If inmates do not watch the pills that are dispensed closely, they could receive medications that are dangerous when taken in combination with other meds. If they refuse to take a pill (which they must take while at the pill window), they can be "written up" and have to defend why they have refused the medication that was ordered for them. In addition, the credentials of the doctors that treat inmates should be examined by someone in the outside world of journalism. I am told that these doctors are not allowed to practice medicine on anyone other than inmates. They cannot even treat a guard that has a cut finger. Whether this is because their credentials are not up to normal standards for practitioners or there is a legal reason why doctors that treat inmates cannot treat anyone other than an inmate would be interesting to find out. To make inmates pay for the ridiculously poor medical attention that they receive is a joke. Most visits to the doctor are required because inmates cannot obtain over the counter medications which would be available to them if they were not in prison. If these OTC medications were made available at the commissary, inmates with funds available could purchase them and save everyone time and effort! Even medications as simple as Glucosamine for arthritis cannot be obtained by prisoners. My father suffers from rheumatoid arthritis which he kept under control by taking Glucosamine. It took over TWO YEARS for him to be able to obtain medication through the prison system which allowed him to regain the use of his fingers. Normally the press ignores inmates rights because that slant is not popular with the public. If more journalists would take the time to get the facts and dig into the real stories about inmates, it would open the eyes of the public and might actually trigger some much needed prison reforms. Texans should be appaulled by the way inmates are treated. Most of us would be in prison ourselves if we treated an animal in the same manner as TDC currently treats prisoners.