Letter from the president of COCHS

Dear Colleague,

With the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, Community Oriented Correctional Health Services (COCHS) recognized the potentially huge implications of parity and Medicaid expansion for the criminal justice system. We have published several papers on these issues, all of which are available on our website at: www.cochs.org.

But the ACA is having other, less widely recognized impacts as well, most notably by driving the creation of consumer-driven health care systems within correctional settings, as well as the establishment of payment arrangements based on value instead of volume.

Two new papers from COCHS address these developments in depth:

• Consumer Rights Come to Jail:  How the Affordable Care Changes the Rights of Individuals Pending Disposition, by COCHS General Counsel Daniel J. Mistak, describes how the ACA endows individuals pending disposition with new consumer rights — and the implications of those rights.

• Development of a Performance-Based RFP for Correctional Health Care Services in Vermont, by COCHS Research Associate Ben Watts, is a case study of how a state correctional health care system created a new performance-based contractual model in alignment with state and federal health reforms.

I think you will find both these reports very informative. I encourage you to read them and share them with your colleagues.

Best wishes,

Steven Rosenberg

President, COCHS