Vermont’s three-year prison health care contract with troubled provider Wellpath is off to a whizbang start. Right off the bat, 15 inmates at the Northwest State Correctional Facility were given the wrong medication by Wellpath providers for their substance use disorder. And now, we have a Wellpath employee in a highly responsible position who has — well, I’d call it a “checkered past” except that all the squares seem to be the same color.

In September, Wellpath hired Robert Stevenson to be its top employee at the Southern State Correctional Facility. Turns out Stevenson lost his nursing license in three different states for “diverting or wasting opioids,” according to VTDigger.

And we only know this because one of his subordinates looked up his record, discovered his malfeasances, and reported it to Wellpath. Its response? The whistleblower was fired.

I’d call this a clown car, but that would be unfair to clowns.

Stevenson told Digger that his repeated failures as a nurse are irrelevant because he’s not doing any nursing.

Yeah, all he’s doing is supervising and directing nurses. Good God in Heaven.

The Corrections Department’s response: duck and cover. Commissioner Nicholas Deml is on parental leave; DOC denied Digger’s request to speak with acting commissioner Al Cormier. Instead, it offered an email full of boilerplate from DOC comms chief Haley Sommer, which isn’t worth quoting.

In a previous post, I provided a Whitman’s Sampler of Wellpath failures and legal entanglements, which I needn’t repeat here. Instead, a reminder that the last tine Vermont contracted with Wellpath, which was then called Correct Care Solutions, it “came under fire from the Human Rights Defense Center and ACLU-VT after the company declined to provide records as part of a public records act request,” which caused ACLU-VT to slam CCS for a lack of transparency. (Quotation from VTDigger.)

Vermont’s three-year contract with Wellpath is now four months old, and we’ve already had two significant pieces of bad news. That, and the overall track record of the prison health care industry, instills precisely zero confidence that we’re in for a smooth, trouble-free partnership with Wellpath.

Problem is, there are no good alternatives. When DOC solicited bids for health care, Wellpath was one of only two bidders. And as ACLU-VT’s James Lyall said to VTDigger, for-profit prison providers have a “built-in incentive to minimize costs and maximize profits,” which has “repeatedly resulted in tragedy in Vermont and around the country.”

Meanwhile, our prison population is getting older and sicker, and many inmates are dealing with mental illness and/or substance use disorder. The Springfield prison is particularly laden with elderly and infirm inmates, and has seen a spate of inmate deaths of late. So I’m sure it’ll be no problem at all when its health care provider is cutting corners and hiring a disgraced professional to oversee its operations.

Well, now that a scandal has erupted, they’ll probably find a way to kick Stevenson out the door or move him to another state. But there’s no reason at all to feel the tiniest shred of confidence in Wellpath. Given the state of the prison health care market, signing a contract with a for-profit provider is just another way of saying we prioritize cost control over our duty to safeguard those who are at our mercy.