A number of news outlets, including the Guardian, are reporting that a North Carolina man staged a one dollar bank robbery to get health care in jail.
What he did was hand the clerk a note that said: “This is a bank robbery, please only give me one dollar.” Then, as he later told the local NBC news station, he calmly sat in the corner of the bank having told the clerk: “I’ll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police.”
. . .
He told the paper he had lost his job after 17 years as a Coca-Cola delivery man, and with it his health insurance. He was in increasing pain from slipped discs, arthritic joints, a gammy foot and a growth on his chest.Since being in the jail he has attained his goal: he has been seen by nurses and an appointment with a doctor is booked.
It sounds true, and it probably is true. But, the story has the feel of one of those things that’s weird, but so easy to believe that maybe it’s a hoax. Anyway, health care for the poor is a huge problem. And the disparity between poor, law abiding citizens who have to go without and poor criminals who at least get some health care is appalling. For those with health challenges, there is actually an advantage to going to jail. They don’t necessarily get the best care, but they frequently get better care than when they’re free.
Jail doctors get to treat the mentally ill, diabetics, and all kinds of other health challenged individuals who go all but untreated on the outside, frequently getting to jail and requesting, for example, all sorts of prescriptions from the distant past which have not been filled with any regularity when the individual wasn’t in jail.
Jails end up having to foot the bill to provide this health care (and to defend against lawsuits when the inmates believe the health care was inadequate.) Unsurprisingly, there isn’t a huge appetite to fund inmate health care when honest, law abiding citizens are often forced to go without.
Update I caught this column from John Thorpe about the “robbery” which was pretty good. The upshot is that we are providing health care in the stupidest possible way.
Update 2 Just saw an article in the Evansville Courier Press by Jonathan Lintner about Vanderburgh County Jail’s shift to in-house medical care. Apparently, the Sheriff’s deputies and inmates used to make a lot more trips to the hospital – at greater expense and security risks.
Years ago, when my now-grown son was a child and we lived in Evansville, I (and my son) witnessed a purse-snatching in a parking lot. As the snatcher ran by me, I yelled, “Drop that purse” or some such suggestion. Which he promptly did, right at my feet. The police came and found him hiding behind the store and took him into custody. I had to go downtown to ID him, and the police officer told me the man told them he did it to get into jail because he needed medical care. I do not know what happened to him after that, I was never called to a trial or anything. Just seems like there should be a better way.
Every other industrialized country provides better access to medical care than we do–usually MUCH better–and spends substantially less to treat all or most of their citizens than we spend while leaving some 45 million (give or take a million) without care.
Do you suppose this is the real “American Exceptionalism”?
Maybe that’s the reason we have more people in jails and prisons than any other country on earth including China.
If you could work gay marriage into the story, you could have had a liberal hat trick (health care, prisons, you need one more thing for the hat trick).
I thought I was impairing my liberal cred by suggesting jails were trying to do the right thing by the inmates, providing care as best they could. Proper liberal dogma, I would suppose, would require a narrative where jailers are all evil, callous, and cruelly indifferent to the plight of inmates.
You’re supposed to rail against the pink hospital gowns and the clinic being housed in a tent out in the yard due to overcrowding.