Lack of health insurance---->Overcrowded prisons?

[ThatsMyBarack]

I watched the SICKO episode on Oprah yesterday. Michael Moore said that no health insurance was the #1 reason for bankruptcy, etc. In my mind I added "overcrowded prisons" to Mike's list.

I've been wondering for quite some time: Do people go to jail when they cannot pay overinflated medical bills, either because they are uninsured or because their insurance companies pull some excuse out of their asses not help pay for expenses? I can picture these poor souls (the patients) having do deal with bill collectors (MR. MEAN!!!!) who threaten them constantly, and maybe send the cops after them? :cry:

[Ellen Forradalom]

1. If there were a connection between the two

I'd guess it were lack of mental health services that would explain it.

[ThatsMyBarack]

2. You're right!

Most insurance companies won't cover counseling to poor souls who desparately need it! :grr:

[Ellen Forradalom]

5. Assuming you have coverage at all

Or a public clinic in your neighborhood.

The very populations that crowd prisons the most are the most underserved in mental health.

[porphyrian]

3. We, thankfully, don't have debtors prisons in America.

You can't make someone pay what they don't have, and you can't throw them in prison just for that. That's why you should always show that you're making an effort to pay off your debt, even if it's a dollar a month. The collectors will complain, but they are less likely to be able to win (you signed a contract) and stick you with court costs (and the judge's prescription for what you have to do now), so they're less likely to bother taking you to court. And right now, with so many people defaulting, they've probably got bigger fish to fry than most people.

At least, that's how I understand it.

[txaslftist]

4. It's possible that if you get caught under an unpayable Doctor's bill...

...you might turn to crime to pay it off; there is probably some mental health connection (with prisons taking the place that mental institutions used to take) and some drug use may be self-medication. Those are the connections that spring to mind. Other than that, people just turning themselves in to prisons for the health care? I don't see it.

The reason we have more prisons than any other country, more prisoners per capita and more prisoners period is because we love to lock each other up. We've rigged the jury trial system to get rid of jury nullification and the right of juries to judge the justice of the case; and we've launched the war on freedom that is the war on drugs.

[Lars39]

6. Yes, it's happened: (Democracy Now! article)

http://tinyurl.com/3y2swv

[ThatsMyBarack]

8. I KNEW IT!!!!

I knew the concept of "Body Attachment"--arresting people who cannot pay medical bills--had to exist somewhere!! Thanks for sharing.

"Body Attachments": Good title for a good movie, no?

[Kelly Rupert]

13. Read the article more closely. That's imprisoning people

who fail to show up for their court date.

[Cleita]

7. I read a book once about skid row bums in a certain

large American city. These men would at times commit anti-social acts, like breaking a window, in a deliberate ploy to get thrown in jail. Jail time usually was thirty days, enough time for them to dry out and get any medical attention they needed before they went back out on the streets.

[catmandu57]

10. Sounds like Ohenry

He did a short story about a man who busted a store window when winter was coming on so that he would have a warm bed for the cold weather, the name escapes me at the present.

[alphafemale]

14. The Cop and the Anthem

Homeless alcoholic tries all night to get arrested, just so he'll have a few hots and a cot.

He tries again and again with no luck.

He finally ends up by a church late that same night and hears a beautiful choir.

Something about it stirs a longing to turn his life around.

That same moment is when he feels the tap on his shoulder and he gets arrested for loitering.

[Cleita]

16. Well, he did get his original wish, a few hots and a cot.

LOL! Visualizing something can at times be powerful, hence the phrase, "be careful what you wish for".

[alphafemale]

21. I like OHenry stories.

Lots of other short story writers from the last century, too.

It's nearly a lost art, though.

[Cleita]

15. Actually it was a thesis from a graduate student, I believe in

Social Studies. He interviewed and studied the denizens of skid row in either Portland or Seattle. I don't remember. It was called, "You Owe Yourself a Drunk". I don't remember the author. A grant researcher at a nearby university gave it to me to read as I was having doubts at the time about being a bartender and if I was doing the right thing selling drinks so he was giving me these research studies on alcoholics to read so I could work my way through my angst.

Of course that graduate student studied these people in the days before Reagan created homelessness. None of these guys lived in shelters. Most had a room somewhere they rented. The reason they slept in the street was because they were too drunk to make it home. They used shelters only when they couldn't make the rent on their "flops" as they were called and as soon as they could they were out of them. Jail time was done to dry out when they felt they needed the break from alcohol and for medical care, not as another means of getting shelter.

On an ironic note, the grant researcher who loaned me the book, lost his job when Proposition 13 passed and all the grants researchers were working on in the universities dried up. Reagan, when governor worked on that with Jarvis. Jarvis managed to get it passed during Jerry Brown's administration. Brown had enough budget surplus to try to run the programs for a few years that prevented homelessness, but when that ran out, you started seeing homeless in the streets of California for the first time. When Reagan became President he spread his legacy nationwide.

[Swamp Rat]

17. James Spradley

I studied his ethnographic research methodology. ;)

[Cleita]

18. Thanks Swampie.

You amaze me with the amount of reading you have done. I have a reason for having read (and forgotten) at lot. I'm old, but you are amazing.

:thumbsup:

[Swamp Rat]

20. It's not surprising

given that I am working on my 3rd and 4th graduate degrees simultaneously.

I almost started another PhD in comparative literature, porque me encanta mucho el Siglo de Oro de España... Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Quevedo, Gongora, Calderón de la Barca, et al. Yo he leido mucho de ellos (en español del renacimiento, por supuesto :D ). Me encantan las obras como "La Vida Es Sueño," etc., pero también me encantan las obras Latinas Americanas del Borges, Neruda, Márquez, y Allende... como "Eva Luna." ;)

Agora estou tentando ler livros Brasileiros de poesia, como Patativa do Assaré, colocado no literatura de cordel (do nordeste dos sertanejos). :D
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patativa_do_Assaré
http://www.tanto.com.br/Patativa.htm

Aqui é poesia contra guerra:
http://poesiacontraaguerra.blogspot.com/2007/01/o-crespculo-sertanejo.html

[antigop]

9. There have been several articles about people "committing"crimes because they have no health ins.

and want to be thrown in jail to get medical care.

On the local news there was a guy who had cancer, didn't have insurance, so he "robbed" banks so he would get caught. He had no intention of taking any money or harming anyone -- he simply wanted to be charged with robbery so he could go to jail and get the healthcare he needed.

Very sad.

[fed-up]

11. our Town Hall Meth meeting last night said 80% of crime is meth related-need $$$ for treatment

Here is an old story while I wait until tomorrow to publish the story covering the town hall meeting last night

DA Mike Ramsey stated that 80% of crime here in Butte County, CA is meth related. I heard story after story about lack of free/low cost drug and mental health treatment for those wanting to kick the meth habit.

http://buttecounty.net/da/OnlineArticles/Chico%20News%20and%20Review%20-%20Cover%20Story%20-%20June%2023,%202005.htm

Cover Story
'Butteants' and 'methamphibians': a horror story

The crippling devastation methamphetamine brings to the people of Butte County

By Jaime O'Neill


Photo By Tom Angel
METHEMATICS
District Attorney Mike Ramsey says the explosion of methamphetamine in Butte County is in part attributable to the passage in 1978 of Proposition 13.

I made my decision
Lead a path of self-destruction
A slow progression
Killing my complexion
And it's rotting out my teeth
I'm on a roll
No self-control
I'm blowing off steam
With methamphetamine

--Green Day, "Geek Stink Breath"

Here’s a story Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey tells: A 9-year-old girl goes into a neighborhood grocery store with her 5-year-old brother in tow. The little girl has her mother's checkbook, and she tries to write a check to buy food. The children are hungry and filthy.

The store owner calls the Sheriff's Department. A deputy responds to the call and is directed to a trailer near the store. The mother answers the door and lets him in.

The place is foul-smelling and littered with dirty clothes and empty bottles. The mother is spun on meth, and, under questioning, immediately gets paranoid, loud and abusive. She comes at the deputy, and as he backs away from her the floor in the living room gives way under him, rotted out by urine and long decay, and the deputy finds himself up to his chest in the collapsed flooring of the trailer.

And then there was the time the D.A. went along on a night raid to a house that served as a meth lab. Electricity to the place had been shut off long since. With deputies at his side, the D.A. proceeded into the darkness guided by the beam of a flashlight.


,,,snip

[Kelly Rupert]

12. No. We do not throw debtors in prison. n/t

[flashl]

19. Florida had a big battle recently about holding mental health inmates in jails n/t