A new phase opened May 7 in the long-running struggle to provide adequate health care for California prison inmates and to end conditions a federal judge said in 2005 were leading to the unnecessary death of one inmate a week.
The State of California, the attorneys who brought the lawsuit on behalf of prison inmates, and the receiver now in charge of prison health care filed a joint report in court this week, setting forth their differing - in some cases opposing - views on how to end the receivership while assuring adequate treatment for the state's current inmates.
The state claims prison health care has been "totally transformed," w