The U.S. is #1 when it comes to running prison colonies (countries ranked by incarceration rate), which just happen to be ideal environments for spreading coronavirus. Pre-plague, a convicted felon, no matter how heinous the crime, had the same right to services in the world’s most expensive health care system as anyone else. If it cost $10 million and a bunch of donated organs to keep a drug abuse-damaged murderer serving 15-20 years alive for another few years, the taxpayer was there to step up and the hospital was there to collect the revenue. If Harvey Weinstein is short of breath while serving his 23-year sentence, under the old rules he gets a ventilator with the same priority as someone who didn’t enjoy sex with a lot of aspiring actresses (and, in fact, if one of his former shower buddies or sex partners falls ill, she might have to wait in line behind her abuser to get the ventilator and ICU bed).
Now that it is obvious that the system doesn’t have enough capacity for the U.S. population, what will happen?
- half the prisoners will get released under a “social criminal distancing” policy?
- convicted criminals will get services with the same priority as everyone else, resulting in the deaths of Americans who haven’t been convicted of any crimes?
- we write down a triage plan where we give an explicit priority to those convicted of crimes (but what should the priority be? Given that criminality is at least partially genetic and released criminals are likely to re-offend, does it make sense to save a 25-year-old who is in prison and from whom we expected 40 more years of crime rather than a 75-year-old in the general population from whom we expect 5 more years in a retirement home?)
- something else?
Readers: Will this crisis break our commitment to giving convicted criminals unlimited health care?
Related:
- “Who Gets the Best Care in America? Prisoners” (MedPage), describing the single-payer Bernie Sanders dreamworld available to about 2 million Americans
- “If health care is a right for American prisoners, why not for free people?” (New York Daily News), explaining the Supreme Court decision that ensures prisoners get every possible procedure
- Washington Post, 2013 about the health care access downside of being released from prison
Rephrase the question without the morality angle. Who is making money providing health care to prisoners and how well do they lobby?
GB: The big money should be made at the regular hospitals where the $1 million cancer treatments and organ transplants are done. They are awesome at lobbying! There are also unionized government workers making money from this. See https://cchcs.ca.gov/ for example. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/watchdog/sdut-prison-doctors-double-pay-with-ot-2015apr01-htmlstory.html describes some of them
As with most government jobs, the pay is higher than for comparable work in the private sector. https://money.cnn.com/2009/12/23/news/economy/healthcare_doctors_in_prison/index.htm says “Better pay, better hours, retirement benefits and free malpractice insurance are just a few of the reasons why physicians are picking prisoners over civilian patients.”