Since 2018, the company has provided medical services in state prisons, some jails, and Bridgewater, the Department of Correction’s mental health facility that has been an embarrassment to the state for decades.
The national behemoth provides medical care to 300,000 inmates across the country, and has been the subject of more than a thousand lawsuits alleging its care in prisons and jails is substandard. It’s owned by private equity giant H.I.G. Capital.
A reminder here that private equity firms are in the business of buying companies, loading them up with debt, demanding aggressive cost-cutting, and eventually selling off their acquisitions for handsome profits.
That’s bad enough when it happens to toy companies, but in healthcare, the consequences can be devastating, as we’re seeing with the imperiled community hospitals Steward and Cerberus Capital stripped for hundreds of millions of dollars and loaded up with debt.
It is almost impossible to make even a modest profit by providing decent healthcare, let alone the margins that firms like Wellpath and H.I.G. demand. There’s no way to get around it: Giant profits mean fewer staff and diminished services for patients.
A report released Wednesday by the Disability Law Center, which has been monitoring the state hospital for a decade, found that, between last June and December, 183 men at Bridgewater were involuntarily medicated with chemical restraints, sometimes when they were completely calm. And that some were subjected to violent and dehumanizing behavior by staff.
Staff are supposed to take a therapeutic approach to men at Bridgewater, who are there for court-ordered psychiatric evaluations, or because they have been found not guilty by reason of insanity. But even though correction officers nowadays have less direct contact with the patients there, it is still a punitive place.
“They still run it like a prison, not a hospital,” said James Pingeon, litigation director for Prisoners Legal Services of Massachusetts.
This latest report follows others asserting that Wellpath has subjected other people in Massachusetts prisons and jails to inhumane treatment, has delayed and denied vital medical and dental treatment to cut costs, and maintained dangerously low staffing levels. Its $119 million contract with the state is up in June.
In a letter to senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, who have been sharply critical of the firm, Wellpath wrote that the company is proud of its frontline caregivers, who “work tirelessly to promote the health and welfare of our populations” in challenging environments.
Many state administrations have tried to improve conditions at Bridgewater, but it keeps sliding backwards. The only way to truly fix it — to turn it from a punitive place into a therapeutic setting for sick people — is to replace that old building, and to move the facility from the Department of Corrections into the Department of Mental Health.
Because, though leaders may say differently, many of those who run the state’s prisons are not especially committed to providing their charges with adequate care, Pingeon said.
“The attitude of many people who work in prisons is, ‘Why should you get medical care, you killed or robbed somebody, you don’t deserve it,’” he said.
When Wellpath’s contract expires, the state should decline to renew it. Ideally, responsibility for medical care should be taken over by a nonprofit, with no Miami-based equity bigs to answer to. If that’s not possible, the state should provide more meaningful oversight to make sure whichever company takes over healthcare in prisons puts patients first — and to impose penalties if they don’t.
And then, one day, we ought to really reexamine this fetish we have for privatizing services we used to trust the Commonwealth to deliver, enriching people who will always care more about windfalls than about the benighted throwaways in a decaying building in Bridgewater.
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com. Follow her @GlobeAbraham.
