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
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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 health care
- COVID Lessons: The Health Care Shutdown
- It’s fortunate that COVID-19 was not as bad as the experts said, because our response was almost entirely to make the problem worse. We shut down everything that could help, including health care for co-morbidities. We locked the healthy and the sick together, and cut people off from routine care. Most of the deaths “from” COVID-19 were probably due more to our response than to the virus itself.
- Community health acts to improve Obamacare
- Democrats now want to talk about how to improve Obamacare. Here’s how to do it.
- Why government-funded cancer research is dangerously unlike the Manhattan Project
- A “Manhattan Project” for cancer is likely to delay cancer cures, and make what cancer cures we find more expensive—like the Epipen. And kill people, like the original Manhattan Project.
- Why does the EpiPen cost so much?
- With Mylan raising the cost of the EpiPen even as the EpiPen enters the public domain, people are complaining—but they’re complaining in ways that will raise health costs even more.
- Strangling the iPhone of health care
- We have no idea what great improvements in health care we have strangled through our current system of government regulations, subsidies, and tax incentives.
- 17 more pages with the topic health care, and other related pages
More public assistance
- Starvation, sharing, and charity
- The modern world makes an evil out of sharing, and then complains that too many people go hungry.
- How many legs does the ACA have?
- If you call public assistance insurance, how many people have insurance? The left wants us to believe that, like Lincoln’s apocryphal dog, the ACA has five legs. But when you call a tail a leg, that doesn’t mean the dog can walk on it.
- A grumpy basic income
- John Cochrane has useful thoughts on Charles Murray’s universal basic income, after the Swiss rejected a very different version.
- Government cheese goes to school
- Government cheese is government cheese, whether it’s a poor food product, poor housing, or poor education.
- The Family Cow
- If you kill the cow for steak today, you won’t have any milk tomorrow. We are digging deep into our national cash cows—taxpayers—and we’re going to soon run out.
- Three more pages with the topic public assistance, and other related pages
More reigning in bad laws
- A one-hundred-percent rule for traffic laws
- Laws should be set at the point at which we are willing and able to jail 100% of offenders. We should not make laws we are unwilling to enforce, nor where we encourage lawbreaking.
- A free market in union representation
- Every monopoly is said to be special, that this monopoly is necessary. And yet every time, getting rid of the monopoly improves service, quality, and price. There is no reason for unions to be any different.
- Bipartisanship in the defense of big government
- We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs. Despite their complaints about Trump’s overreach, Democrats have introduced legislation to make it harder for them to block his administration’s regulations.
- The Last Defense against Donald Trump?
- When you’ve dismantled every other defense, what’s left except the whining? The fact is, Democrats can easily defend against Trump over-using the power of the presidency. They don’t want to, because they want that power intact when they get someone in.
- The Sunset of the Vice President
- Rather than automatically sunsetting all laws (which I still support), perhaps the choice of which laws have not fulfilled their purpose should go to an elected official who otherwise has little in the way of official duties.
- 20 more pages with the topic reigning in bad laws, and other related pages
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
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