Inmate care costs challenge industry
Source: By MAUREEN MILFORD, The News Journal (DE), 03/26/2006
Jackie Battaglia Moore was a 30-year-old nurse in 1978 when she saw a market opportunity and seized it. A Wilmington native and graduate of the University of Delaware, Moore is widely credited with pioneering the private, for-profit prison health industry. ..... But if Moore had to start all over in the current prison health environment, she wouldn't do it. Skyrocketing prescription costs and the rising number of prisoners with mental illness, hepatitis C and age-related diseases have changed the landscape, she said. ..... Privatization arose in part after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that people behind bars have a constitutional right to health care. When companies like PHS emerged in the late 1970s, states quickly saw them as a way to outsource a function to a private firm that promised to be more efficient at delivering and managing care, experts said.