A California prison inmate received a new heart earlier this month in a transplant operation that could end up costing taxpayers as much as $1 million, prison officials said Friday.
The operation appears to mark the most extreme application yet of a court mandate to give prisoners the same standard of medical care as the average law-abiding patient.
The operation was performed Jan. 3 at Stanford Medical Center, but not reported publicly until this week. State prison officials said they believe the operation was the first heart transplant ever performed on a prison inmate, although not the first organ transplant.
In 1995, a federal court ordered California to give a kidney transplant to a prison inmate whose request for one had been denied. Because of that case, correctional officials said they had no choice but to allow the inmate to undergo the heart transplant.
"This is all we can do under the law," said Stephen Green, assistant secretary of the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency. "We must follow the court's mandate, and that's what we're doing."
"We're not insensitive to the larger issues here," added Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections. "There's the whole question of how far should we go for inmate medical care. That's not really a question for us to answer."
It is, however, a question that officials likely will confront more often. The number of inmates obtaining organ transplants is likely to rise nationwide in coming years because of the large number of prisoners who have been diagnosed with hepatitis C and are likely to need new livers, said Scott Chavez, a spokesman for the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.
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