Rep. Chris England is calling out a state prison system healthcare vendor with a murky past who has filed for bankruptcy and is questioning why the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) would contract with them considering their questionable past.

At Issue

England is accusing YesCare of defrauding the state after the company filed for bankruptcy, leaving employees and vendors unpaid. He alleges corrections would have discovered a similar action by basically the same company under a different name.

YesCare used to be a company called Corizon. Corizon filed bankruptcy. They closed one company, reconstituted under a different name, built a whole bunch of creditors and vendors.

Previous Legal Issues

Two years ago, the Department of Justice’s US Trustee Program — the watchdog of the federal bankruptcy system — called for the dismissal of the then Corizon Health contentious bankruptcy.

After a year of spending considerable resources on the case, the Trustee’s filing stated, there was still no approvable plan between the company and its creditors. In a mid-January motion, a committee representing prisoners who filed suit against Corizon alleging medical neglect requested that a federal judge dismiss the bankruptcy outright.

The legislator is questioning why ADOC didn’t do due diligence when considering YesCare as a healthcare provider. Instead, they continued doing business with YesCare despite the previous contract breaches involving unpaid vendors.

ADOC did terminate its YesCare contract in May after determining the company failed to fulfill its contractual obligations. They then entered into an emergency agreement with NaphCare to provide prison healthcare services.

Original reporting: The Tuscaloosa Thread — read the source article.