Texas’ “geriatric” inmates (55 and older) make up just 7.3 percent of Texas’ 160,000-offender prison population, but they account for nearly a third of the system’s hospital costs. Prison doctors routinely offer up the oldest and sickest of them for medical parole, a way to get those who are too incapacitated to be a public threat and have just months to live out of medical beds that Texas’ quickly aging prison population needs. They’ve recommended parole for 4,000 such inmates within the last decade. But the state parole board has only agreed in a quarter of these cases, leaving the others to die in prison — and on the state’s dime.
Emily Ramshaw
Emily Ramshaw was the editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune from 2016 to 2020. During her tenure, the Tribune — billed “one of the nonprofit news sector’s runaway success stories” — won a Peabody Award, several national Murrow Awards and top honors from the Online News Association.
Before joining the Tribune in 2010 as one of its founding reporters, Ramshaw spent six years at The Dallas Morning News, where she broke national stories about sexual abuse inside Texas’ youth lock-ups, reported from inside a West Texas polygamist compound and uncovered “fight clubs” inside state institutions for the disabled. The Texas APME named Ramshaw its 2008 star reporter of the year. In 2016, she was named to the board of the Pulitzer Prizes.
A native of Washington, D.C., and the product of two journalist parents, Ramshaw graduated from Northwestern University in 2003 with dual degrees in journalism and American history.
Posted in
State Government
TribBlog: Perry Takes a Knee [Updated]
Gov. Rick Perry’s having knee surgery on Friday. In an e-mail sent out this afternoon, Dana Parish, deputy finance director for Texans for Rick Perry, notified supporters that a campaign event had been rescheduled because of the impending surgery.
Posted in
Health care
Threatening the Safety Net
The biggest consumer benefit of federal health care reform — adding millions more Americans to insurance rolls — could spell disaster for some public hospitals.
Posted in
Health care
Kenneth Cooper: The TT Interview
The world-renowned Dallas doctor who essentially invented jogging as exercise talks with the Tribune about health care reform, the crisis of obesity in Texas, and what lawmakers must do to shore up the physical-education legislation they passed last session.
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Health care
TribBlog: Health Care Reform Could Cost TX Only $4.5 Billion?
In an ironic twist, states that have done the least to bring low-income residents onto state Medicaid rolls — including Texas — stand to benefit the most from federal health care reform, according to a report released this morning by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.
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Health care
Diagnosis: Turf War
In Texas, nurse practitioners’ livelihoods are tied to physicians: By law, they can’t treat patients without a doctor’s permission. That means if they want to open their own practice, they must petition, and pay, a doctor to grant them “prescriptive authority” — to essentially keep an eye on their work and, in some cases, to be held liable for it. Doctors say this is as it should be. Nurse practitioners and their allies say doctors don’t want the competition and charge them enough to run them out of business. “It borders on an immoral situation,” says state Rep. Wayne Christian, R-Center.
Posted in
Health care
Uninformed Consent
Lawmakers said Monday that the state’s newborn disease screening program — which has been used to warehouse infant blood samples for biomedical and forensics research — has misled parents and given them few options to protect their babies’ DNA.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
TribBlog: Study: Mentally Ill End Up in Texas Prisons
Texas has nearly eight times as many people with serious mental illness in jails and prisons as it does in psychiatric hospitals, according to a new study by the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriffs’ Association.
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Health care
Doctors Without Borders
That’s right — they’re not from Texas. Newly licensed physicians enlisting to treat the state’s Medicaid and Medicare patients are more likely to have been trained at international medical schools, according to a review of state medical licensing data.
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Health care
TribBlog: Capitol CPR
Lawmakers and state employees are getting trained in CPR and defibrillator use today — almost a year after Rep. Edmund Kuempel, R-Seguin, suffered a heart attack and collapsed in a Capitol elevator. He was saved by his colleague, Rep. John Zerwas, an anesthesiologist who resuscitated him with CPR.
