Illinois Prisons Have Gone a Year Without Long-term Healthcare Contract
by Chuck Sharman
The Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) has yet to ink another long-term contract for prisoner healthcare since backing out of a 10-year, $4 billion agreement with Wexford Health Sources in July 2025. Instead, a series of 90-day emergency contracts were given to rival Centurion Health before a one-year deal that was signed in January 2026 for $507 million.
From interviews with prisoners and their families, the Chicago Sun Times reported in July 2026 that “critically understaffed facilities struggle to deliver proper correctional medicine to the tens of thousands of incarcerated people in their care.” As the news outlet also reported, that prompted independent prison monitor John Howard Association Executive Director Jennifer Vollen Katz to wonder, “What in God’s name are we paying for?”
Not much, according to the Monitor appointed by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in a long-running class-action challenge to the DOC’s shoddy healthcare. As PLN reported, the Monitor’s January 2026 report criticized the prison agency for making some policy changes but few if any of the other improvements promised in a consent decree in the case, including hiring more staff, creating a medical record system and improving infrastructure. [See: PLN, Mar. 2026, p.62.]
With the changeover to Centurion, DOC prisoners also lost access to some independent medical providers contracted by Wexford, like Brightmore Physical Therapy in the Will County suburbs southwest of Chicago. Physical therapist and owner/operator Marc O’Niel told the Sun Times not only that he lost 25 incarcerated patients but that Wexford stiffed him on his last $11,000 bill, claiming it hadn’t been paid by the DOC, but offering no specifics.
“They’re blaming it on the state and holding us hostage,” he said.
Source: Chicago Sun Times
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