Managing Prison Health Care Spending

“This report examines Pew’s findings on state prison health care spending and explores the factors driving costs higher. It also illustrates a variety of promising approaches that states are taking to address these challenges ... These examples offer important lessons as policymakers seek the best ways to make their correctional health care systems effective and affordable” (p. 4). Sections of this publication include: overview; the challenge for the states-location, staffing, and inmate transportation, a legal standard for care, prevalence of metal illness and disease, and the growth in the number of older inmates and their associated higher costs; sates responses to growing costs-telehealth technologies, advances in outsourcing of care, Medicaid financing, and the paroling of elderly and/or ill inmates.