Texas Prisoner Health Funding

    I found an article from the Austin American-Statesman titled "Options running out on prison health funding" that talks about the Texas budget for correctional managed health care. The current House version of the two-year budget allocates about $700 million for prisoner health care, which medical officials say is about $200 million less than what is likely needed to care for Texas' 112 state prisons. Top aides of Governor Rick Perry have suggested privatization for parts of Texas' prisoner health care network to help curb the spiraling cost, currently the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston provides care for two-thirds of Texas prisoners while Texas Tech provides for the rest. Another option being discussed is to set a single reimbursement rate statewide for prison health care instead of two different rates for the universities providing health care. I think that the Texas Legislature should go with the single reimbursement rate plan, as this plan is will take much less time and effort to set up compared to privatizing portions of the health care network. Time is an issue for the Legislature as they say in the article that there are only 55 days left in the session, and there are still lots of other issues concerning budgets left to plan for, I think it would be the best solution to use the proposed plan for a single reimbursement rate.