By C1 Staff
UMATILLA COUNTY, Ore. — Even with 40 percent off, a former Umatilla County Jail inmate’s medical bills totaled upwards of $150,000 – all on the taxpayer’s tab.
Wallowa reports that the county board of commissioners approved the payment for dialysis treatment for inmate Dean Anthlone Pennie. Pennie served time in the jail on multiple charges from early January to May.
He was originally incarcerated on child neglect and marijuana charges at the Two Rivers Correctional Institution; while he was behind bars there, he plotted the murder of a man and to kidnap and assault a woman, neither of whom lived in Umatilla County.
But since he made threats in that county, the DOC moved him there. Umatilla County Sheriff Terry Rowan said Pennie arrived at the jail “with basically zero notice” and no mention from the prison that he required dialysis three times a week.
The county jail does not have an in-house dialysis machine, unlike state prisons.
The county jail only budgets $150,000 for outside medical expenses, but Pennie’s armed guard escorts to the dialysis center cost $40,000 a month.
Health insurance was not a possibility for Pennie as an inmate (though that law will change in 2015); he could also not go back to Two Rivers because he remains innocent of the new charges.
A deal was eventually reached where Pennie was transferred out of Ulmatilla County and is now under electronic surveillance in a halfway house in Portland, where the Oregon Health Plan was allowed to cover him.
Even though Pennie was gone, the county still had to pay his medical bill.
“I got this package, one bill,” Rowan said, “and it’s 280-some-odd-thousand dollars.”
After some haggling, the Blue Mountain Kidney Center agreed to slash 40 percent of the bill for a one-time payment of $168,026.
Rowan was thankful for the center’s generosity, but that dealing with extreme medical costs for inmates like Pennie remains a challenge.