From Prison Policy Initiative:
Reported by Emily Widra, August 29, 2024
In most states, people incarcerated in prisons must pay medical copays and fees for physician visits, medications, dental treatment, and other health services. While these copays may be as little as two or five dollars, they still represent massive barriers to healthcare. This is because incarcerated people are disproportionately poor to start with, and those who work typically earn less than a dollar an hour and many don’t work at all. A new report published in JAMA Internal Medicine builds on our analyses of prison copay and wage policies across all state prison systems and the findings are clear: medical copays in prisons are associated with worse access to healthcare behind bars. These unaffordable fees are particularly 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.
In their recent publication, Dr. Lupez and her fellow researchers analyzed nationally representative data from state and federal prison populations published in the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016. While we previously published our own analysis of the same dataset in 2021, this new research goes further by analyzing changes from the 2004 data and mapping our copays and wages data onto health data from people in prison. The researchers compared the 2004 and 2016 iterations of the Survey and found that, overall, people in prison are facing more chronic physical and mental health conditions than they were in 2004. Continue reading >>>
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