Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Medical Company has Checkered Past

Alabama has recently entered into two state contracts with companies that have checkered histories. In both instances, the Huntsville Times reports, connections to Alabama Governor Bob Riley appear to have played a role in awarding the contracts.

Correctional Medical Services (CMS) of St. Louis has won a $233.73 million contract to provide inmate health-care services. CMS bid $6 million more than the losing bidder. So did CMS receive the bid because of the quality of its services?

If so, articles in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch indicate that might not have been justified.

CMS has a history in Alabama, and this article shows that it hasn't always been a glowing one.

In 1994 CMS hired a physician as head of mental health services for the Alabama prison system. The doctor's medical license had been revoked nine years earlier in Michigan after a finding that he had engaged in sexual acts with a psychiatric patient and falsely billed an insurance company for the treatment.

In another case, CMS hired a physician as medical director for one of Alabama's correctional facilities shortly after his release from a drug center. The doctor had pled guilty to a sex crime in Tennessee several years earlier. He was charged with three counts of having oral and "penetrating" sex with a 16-year-old "mentally defective" boy.

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