By Kapish Kalita
EASTHAMPTON, MASS – Healthcare for the incarcerated is limited because of copays and other costs, according to a study by the Prison Policy Initiative.
PPI wrote recently, “A new report published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that medical copays,” medical fees for incarcerated individuals “in prisons are associated with worse access to healthcare behind bars,” are “devastating because they deter necessary care among an incarcerated population that faces many medical conditions — often at higher rates than national averages — and routinely faces inadequate health services behind bars.”
The Prison Policy Initiative added the report “analyzed nationally representative data from state and federal prison populations published in the Bureau of Justice Statistics Survey of Prison Inmates…analyzing changes from the 2004 data” and found “overall, people in prison are facing more chronic physical and mental health conditions than they were in 2004.”
The report noted it “measured the effect of prison medical copays on access to specific healthcare services (including pregnancy-related care), and after viewing 2017 copay and wage info “found further evidence that medical copays limit access to care among the most vulnerable people in the system.”
Medical copays are just a part of America’s lackluster prison healthcare system, argued Prison Policy Initiative, adding “nearly 1 in 5 have gone without a single health-related visit since entering state prison.”
The Prison Policy Initiative added “that even the most basic care — like obstetric exams for pregnant people or any visit with a healthcare provider for people with chronic conditions — is not provided to surprisingly large portions of the affected population.”
The Prison Policy Initiative described the specific failures of prison healthcare, stating that “more than 1 in 10 people (14 percent) with at least one chronic condition in state and federal prisons had not been seen by a clinician since they were incarcerated.
“One-third” of mental health patients have not received “any clinical mental health treatment since entering prison… and 50 percent of pregnant prisoners are receiving “zero pregnancy-education from a healthcare provider…after entering prison.”
The Prison Policy Initiative noted in the report that “prison systems with more expensive medical copays (relative to prison wages) limit access to necessary healthcare for incarcerated pregnant people and those with chronic conditions more than prisons with no copays or copays equivalent to or less than one week’s prison wage.”
The Prison Policy Initiative said it found medical copays clearly impact access to healthcare for the more than 500,000 people incarcerated in state and federal prisons who have conditions like heart disease, asthma, kidney disease, and hepatitis C.”
PPI said pregnant individuals or those with chronic conditions in state prisons where copays exceed a week’s wage are less likely to have seen a healthcare clinician while incarcerated than those in prisons that charge no copays or lower copay amounts.”
The Prison Policy Initiative said it worries about groups of individuals already struggling receiving healthcare outside of prison, especially the elderly and minorities, who now face lackluster “prison healthcare creat(ing) a situation in which each year spent in prison takes two years off of an individual’s life expectancy.”
Prison Policy Initiative explains how “a larger portion of the prison population is facing chronic illness and in many cases multiple chronic illnesses” and how the “proportion of people in prison with chronic mental health conditions practically doubled from 2004 to 2016 (14 percent to 27 percent).”
