Nobody knows when the
Florida Supreme Court will decide this issue, or how they will rule when they
do...all we can do is wait it out and until then I will remain under an active death warrant.
So, this week I would like to address another matter - the systemic
denial of adequate medical care in the Florida prison system. Generally, I
don't talk about my own health problems as it's not something I want to
put out there for public consumption. But like so many others here at
Florida State Prison - and the Florida prison system as a whole - it's
gotten so bad that I must address it and ask for help from those who are
reading this.
It's an undisputed fact that many years ago while serving
in the Army I had an on-duty accident that resulted in a lengthy
hospitalization and my honorable discharge. I am now a legally
recognized "disabled veteran" and suffer a permanent physical
disability recognized as "degenerative disc disease" in the lower
lumbar spine, and "lumbar radiculopathy" with incomplete mild paralysis. What this means in layman's
terms is that when I suffered this accident, it resulted in permanent and
progressively degenerate damage to my spinal cord that produces often extreme physical pain.
In the many years that I've been in the
Florida prison system I have come to accept that the best I can hope for
is minimal treatment. If I'm lucky, I can get non-narcotic pain
medication to try to manage the pain. Generally, that means a prescription
of extra strength Ibuprofen or Naproxen. Being that I am in prison,
they're not going to prescribe anything stronger so the most I can do is
try to manage the pain, mostly by avoiding physical exertions that would
cause a flare-up.
As my condition predictably progressed through the years,
so too has the now almost constant pain substantially increased to the
extent that even the Naproxen or Ibuprofen have little effect. Again, I
generally accept that this is prison and they are not going to do
anything more than the minimum. However, shortly after my death warrant
was signed and I was transferred to Florida State Prison, I began having
problems
getting even the Naproxen that that I regularly received, and the
Flexeril that I received as a muscle relaxer so that the muscle spasms
regularly suffer will settle down enough so that at least I can sleep
at night.
The thing is, I'm not alone, since Florida contracted prison
medical care to a private company called 'Corizon", which is a
for-profit healthcare provider with a long history of denying adequate
health care, complaints such as mine have become only too common. These
privately contracted health care providers get paid the same whether
they actually provide adequate health care or not and so every dollar
they spend providing treatments, or even prescribing medication, takes
money out of their own pockets and for-profit companies cannot stay in
business long if they don't make a profit.
This
point needs to be addressed momentarily - the reason America has the
highest incarceration rate in the world today is because the American
prison system is a for-profit multibillion-dollar industry, and there
are
thousands of companies that compete for contracts to provide services to
prisoners, from sypplying toilet paper, food, health care - even
running entire prisons. Most would argue that that doesn't make any
sense as
prisons cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year.
However,
while the
taxpayers to pay obscene amounts of money to keep all those prisoners
locked up, what is not as obvious is that companies wanting to provide
services to this prison industry win the contract by donating huge
sums of money to politicians running for office. And when the
politicians win elected office, they reward their benefactors with
lucrative
contracts, only too often amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.
That's how the system really works.
Companies like Corizon have a long
history of being rewarded contracts to provide health care only to then
refuse to provide basic health care as a means of increasing their own
profits. In fact, Corizon itself previously went by another corporate
name
that was awarded a contract to provide medical care to Florida
prisoners and provided such deliberately incompetence care that
prisoners died, and the contract was terminated...the company then
changed the name
of the corporation to Corizon, donated huge sums of money to State
politicians running for election, and got the contract back.
In the past
year the health care provided by Corizon has gotten so bad that again
many prisoners died from being denied adequate medical care. Only
after the media made it a story did the Florida Department of Law
Enforcement (FDLE) and the Florida legislature open investigations into
the
systematic deprivation of adequate health care in Florida prisons. Not
surprisingly, neither the FDLE or the Florida legislative actually did
anything - not a single person within the Corizon corporation was held
responsible for the many inmate deaths resulting from the deliberate
denial of adequate medical care..not even one! As soon as the mainstream
media lost interest, the whole issue quickly died.
That's how healthcare in
American prisons system really works - it's a completely corrupt process in which the only
thing that matters is that the company awarded the contract makes
millions while the prisoners suffer and die - and since we are prisoners nobody really cares.
Back to my own problems with receiving
even minimal medical care. After my death warrant was signed and I was
transferred to Florida State Prison, my prescription "expired" and the
doctor simply refused to renew them. They play all kind of games to try
to blame the prisonor for the denial of adequate medical care. In my
case, they said that before my prescriptions could be renewed, I needed to
have a blood test, and in late February 2016 I had the blood taken, then was
seen by "dr. Lee", who refused to renew my medication. I then took the
matter to the Florida state prison Warden, who tried to help - only
to have the Corizon-employed Health Services administrator blatantly lie to the Warden, telling him that I
refused to the blood test, claiming instead that I was seen on March
17th, 2016 and counseled on the importance of providing blood test.
These
are the games they play. Anytime you file a formal grievance about the
denial of adequate medical care it comes back with the same response -
put in a request for "sick call" (the process available to seek medical
care). But as with me, and most others, I did put in numerous "sick
call" requests, but the Corizon staff will then wait up to several weeks
and then do nothing but talk to you at cell front, and they'll tell you
to put in another "sick call" request, then another - and if you're
lucky several months later you might actually see a doctor, who will
then tell you that you need to do another "updated" blood test before
medication can be prescribed, and ofter you wait for weeks to have that
done, they'll claim you "refused" to do the blood test, and you must
start the whole process over again. Of course, they can never produce a
signed 'refusal' form as you didn't refuse.
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