by Michael Dean Thompson

Prison healthcare profiteer NaphCare is a private company based in Alabama with over $300 million in revenue that is expected to exceed $1 billion within ten years. The company recently announced it is withdrawing operations from more Washington jails. In a statement, NaphCare said, “Unreasonably large civil verdicts have significantly increased liability exposure throughout the industry, making it more difficult for providers to sustainably operate in certain jurisdictions.”

The company operates in 23 states across the country, including Alabama, Nevada, Texas, and Virginia. By 2022, it had seen more than 150 lawsuits for “constitutionally inadequate and established practices,” according to a lawsuit in which a federal jury awarded $25 million to a former Pierce County prisoner whose leg needed to be partially amputated due to NaphCare’s medical neglect. Another, more recent lawsuit placed the lawsuit count at over 250.

NaphCare, like many other prison healthcare profiteers, contracts a flat fee for its services. This encourages them to lower their standard of care. Jim McLane is the founder, owner and board chair of NaphCare. He told the Birmingham Business Journal that the key to his company’s profitability is that it puts up “barriers so that [prisoners] do not avail themselves to unnecessary treatment.” Those barriers are intrinsic to its business model such that staff are rewarded for denying healthcare. For the Regional Medical Director, their income is tied to profitability, incentivizing them to cut costs and even falsify records. The latter led to NaphCare agreeing to return $694,593 to the Federal Bureau of Prisons for submitting false claims.

Another cost saving policy used by NaphCare is to rely on Licensed Practical Nurses (LPN) rather than physicians. Those LPNs are then asked to make critical decisions outside their training or qualifications. For Javier Tapia, it was only after weeks of distress without ever having seen a doctor that a guard informed a registered nurse of Talia’s “toes turning black” before anyone actually examined him. He was then sent to the hospital where, after weeks of treatment, they amputated his left leg below the knee.

In that case, as well as one involving the wrongful death of a 55-­year-­old mother, medical distress led to being placed in a “medical watch cell” that was monitored by guards, not medical staff. Similar to Tapia, that woman never saw a doctor. She died in the watch cell in a pool of blood and vomit due to a ruptured intestine.

NaphCare remains in Kitsap, Benton, and Pierce counties, though Pierce County has contracted with Mediko to begin providing service at the completion of a nine-­month NaphCare contract extension around the end of the year. As PLN reported, Tapia was awarded a massive $26.75 million jury verdict in 2022, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit remanded most of that in June 2025 for recalculation by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington. [See: PLN Jan. 2026, p.10; and p.25.]  

Source: Seattle Times