Medicaid Change Sending up to 70 California Inmates in Nursing Home Care Back to Prison

[left-of-center2012]

A new California policy and federal rules could limit medical parole to 70 inmates, sending dozens of quadriplegic, paraplegic or otherwise permanently incapacitated inmates from nursing homes back to state prisons.

California officials said they have no choice under a new approach to the enforcement of federal licensing requirements for nursing homes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Prison officials said a change in federal rules led them to limit medical parole to only those inmates who are so ill they are hooked to ventilators to breathe, as their movement is so limited they are not a public danger.

Steve Fama, an attorney with the nonprofit Prison Law Office, said the court-appointed federal office that controls health care in California prisons told him the change could affect about 70 of the 210 inmates approved for medical parole under the current system. "It'd be an awful shame if those people were returned to prison. Those patients have been proven not to need a prison setting given their medical conditions," Fama said.

https://www.newsweek.com/medicaid-change-sending-70-california-inmates-nursing-home-care-back-prison-1654675

[Wounded Bear]

1. Some things are just fucking wrong...

[jimfields33]

2. Wow! Who made these federal changes and why?

Who signed the bill into law? What was the congress make up at the time? These are important questions that need addressed and the current congress needs to discuss them.

[marble falls]

3. Prisons are not set up to handle those guys ...

... Texas paroled a three time felon next door to our condo.

He was a bad man - a coke and meth dealer.

He was t-boned trying escape his third arrest and should have died. His pelvis is held together with the longest wood screw I've ever seen. His lower legs and feet look like some one dropped a can of screws and metal scraps over them in the x-rays. He can't walk two steps straight on flat ground. He's had bladder cancer (which is why I feel a connection) and he's has Huntington's Disease.

Texas just could not cope with that and he's the only "three time loser" I ever heard of being paroled. But there's no sort of treatment or residential programs for him, either - this is, after all, Texas.

He has hallucinations and he can bench press 300#. Some of the hallucinations are of a paranoid variety, some are amusing in the retelling, like the time he got angry because he mistook my coffee cup for a cell phone that I wouldn't let him use.

I take him to coffee and I bring it to his house. This is the guy I found out hadn't been vaxxed as I was driving him to the hospital.

As a nation, we treat our prisoners and the poor terribly. My neighbor needs treatment and a more secure living situation. Prisons are not it. Neither is his sister's spare condo.
These are people Social Security is meant to help, too.