A healthcare provider’s offer to more than double the county’s costs for providing its jail inmates with medical coverage was sent to solitary Monday afternoon.
At the Dakota County Board of Commissioners meeting, the board approved a proposal by Sheriff Chris Kleinberg that would allow the county to provide its own coverage for those serving time in the Dakota County Jail with local nurses at a much more cost-effective price, saving the county having to pay for a $172,000 increase in medical coverage for the inmates.
Kleinberg said the proposal made by Advanced Correctional Healthcare Inc. (ACH) called for a 234 percent increase in what the county would pay for coverage by the company, going from $127,000 to more than $298,000 beginning Nov. 1.
Kleinberg said the county has used ACH’s services since 2016, “but it has slowly gotten more expensive with less service.”
Part of ACH’s proposal was to provide nurses from out of state and using only their doctors, rather than taking advantage of physician and nursing availability locally. The county would also save money on overtime pay for its deputies.
Instead, Kleinberg said that an on-staff nurse at the jail and a part-time nurse that would be moved to full time could provide better local service, working with local physicians, for one-tenth the cost.
“Liabililty would be the only concern, but using NIRMA’s policies we should be okay,” Kleinberg said.
Inmates in the state’s jail system have a constitutional right to health care, the county sheriff noted, and the nurses who work in the county’s jail already have a repertoire with the inmates that would make it easier for them to provide the service they would need.
“Our nurse has been here a long time and knows most everybody, and the other RN that has been here part-time the past two years, if we hire her full-time she can cut the other nurse’s overtime and that would offset (those costs),” he said.
“Going from $127,000 to $298,000 is just crazy,”
Commissioner Bob Giese said. “I don’t know how they would expect us not to do something else . . . $30 an hour for an RN, you’re not going to touch that anywhere else.”
