This commentary is by Leslie Thorsen of Chester. She has been an operating room registered nurse for 46 years and is a member of Vermont Just Justice.The state of Vermont does not have capital punishment, yet David Mitchell, an incarcerated Vermonter died gasping for air. 28 V.S.A. § 801 states: “The department shall provide health care for inmates in accordance with the prevailing medical standards.” Sadly, David Mitchell, 46 at the time, was not the recipient of the care our law mandates. Instead, he received the equivalent of the death penalty.Our state sadly enters into contracts with out-of-state, for-profit health care providers. Vermont’s former prison health care provider is Vitalcore, some of whose employees, under the guidance of the mothership, have been accused of providing negligent care to incarcerated inmates throughout our country. The company’s goal is to make money, and they do so off the backs of our most unempowered and silenced population in all the land: the incarcerated. Wellpath, a health care company owned by a private equity firm, is at the helm of Vermont’s negligent incarcerative care right now. Our state willingly pays them almost $40 million a year to take care of 1,300 of our fellow Vermonters. If a health care provider or nurse dares to speak out about the standard of care, whoosh, they are fired on the spot. Ask nurse Louise Walker, who was fired by Wellpath, or ask Dr. Zazzali, who is suing Vitalcore for allegedly forging his hard-earned MD signature to perpetuate their minimal bare shred of health care.On the Vermont Department of Corrections website, the DOC lists as one of their references, “National Commission on Correctional Healthcare, Standards for Health Services in Prisons.” Oh, what date is that manual from — 2014? My, how time flies when incarcerative “health care” is just a check mark in a box. My advocacy group, Vermont Just Justice has appeared before Vermont’s House Corrections and Institutions Committee with live testimony from the recipients of care from both of these for-profit health care companies. The committee has heard the experiences of enough Vermonters to believe that this care is substandard, dangerous and uncaring. The directive of “first, do no harm” is actually practiced as “first, do nothing that costs money” followed by “second, do nothing.”READ MORE Our Legislature is aware our inmates are not getting what the law mandates. They, too, do nothing. If they really wanted to change the for-profit health care cycle they could do the following:We presented the idea to the House Corrections and Institutions Committee to begin to build our own incarcerative health care infrastructure. We have two major medical centers with medical schools in close proximity to our prisons, we have nursing schools as well. For what we pay these companies, we could create a system that keeps money in our state, and could in fact recruit future medical students, nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants who may be interested in correctional health care as a career.Rhode Island is similar in size and they have done just this. Why are we throwing millions of dollars out the door to a for-profit LLC who has little to no interest in providing decent health care. LLCs, or limited liability companies, are created as low-risk high-profit-margin entities for investors. Is that the health care model dedicated to the prevailing standard of care?Perhaps if Vitalcore had been as committed to treating a 46-year-old who deteriorated from the day he arrived at the DOC, as they are to making profit through negligence, our incarcerated population would maintain their health and upon release be able to be healthy productive members of society, as opposed to shells of what they once were.Time to take back our health care for the incarcerated, and prevent another untimely death. Time to say no to profit over health care. Wealthy LLC investors should not add another yacht to their fleet by being complicit in a scheme that denies health care. A prison sentence in Vermont should not be the death penalty. I am calling on the Legislature to take back prison health care!Read the story on VTDigger here: Leslie Thorsen: Take back prison health care.