$30,000 a Day for Care of Brain Dead Prisoner? Medical Release Legislation Provides Rare Opportunity to Alleviate Deficit and Pr

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Ann Nisenson and Vanessa Huang
Justice Now

“Ludicrous" is what Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called California’s lack of process for releasing Daniel Provencio from prison in 2005. Provencio, who was left brain dead after a prison guard shot him with a foam bullet, cost the state over $30,000 a day for his care.

All of that was supposed to change in October 2007, when Schwarzenegger had the rare opportunity to pass common sense into law by signing Assembly Bill 1539, “Medical Release and Fiscal Savings Bill,” which streamlines the existing medical release process for people who are terminally ill in prison, and enables people who are permanently medically incapacitated like Provencio to also qualify. Before AB 1539 passed, people who are permanently medically incapacitated were not eligible to apply for medical release.

Members of Justice Now’s staff were among the few providing medical release services to people in prison in the 1990s, and today Justice Now continues to be the only law office in California with a principle focus on providing Californians with free legal assistance in this area. Our experience showed that there were no existing procedures before AB 1539 in place to ensure the medical release process worked for all who qualify. Specifically, a lack of notification procedures and directives to prison medical staff have resulted in about fifty percent reduction in medical releases since the mid 1990s, during the leadership of former Governor Pete Wilson. The passing of AB 1539 was meant to address this problem by implementing procedural protections to ensure fiscal responsibility and to alleviate prison overcrowding.

Under this new law, the effective release of people who are terminally ill and permanently incapacitated from prison annually would relieve the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) of approximately $10 million annually in costs associated with the care for these populations. It costs the CDCR $120,000 per personal annually to care for people who are terminally ill or incapacitated as opposed to approximately $50,000 by Medi-Cal. The federal government sponsors half of the Medi-Cal cost producing an enormous savings for the state of California. Based on past medical release cases, it is accurate to estimate that roughly half of the people released under the medical release law will be cared for at home and not in skilled nursing facilities, in which case the Medi-Cal cost incurred to the state is even smaller and the total annual savings even higher.