Before he went to prison, Ernest killed his 2-year-old daughter in the grip of a psychotic delusion. When the Indiana Department of Correction released him in 2015, he was terrified something awful might happen again.
He had to see a doctor. He had only a month's worth of pills to control his delusions and mania. He was desperate for insurance coverage.
But the state failed to enroll him in Medicaid, although under the Affordable Care Act Indiana had expanded the health insurance program to include most ex-inmates. Left to navigate an unwieldy bureaucracy on his own, he came within days of running out of the pills that ground him in reality.
This investigation comes from Beth Schwartzapfel at The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, and Jay Hancock, Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit news service covering health policy issues at the federal and state level.
Radio story for Morning Edition by Jake Harper with WFYI and Side Effects Public Media, a news collaborative covering public health.
"I have a serious mental disorder, which is what caused me to commit my crime in the first place," said Ernest, who asked reporters to use only his middle name to protect his privacy. "Somebody should have been pretty concerned."
[For more of this story go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...aign=shotshealthnews]
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