Arkansas lawmakers advance contested corrections department medical contract

(Getty Images)

A legislative committee on Tuesday forwarded a $235.5 million medical contract for the Arkansas Department of Corrections to the Arkansas Legislative Council for final approval on Friday, but the deal still faces significant opposition from key lawmakers.

The contract presented to the Arkansas Legislative Council’s Review subcommittee represents the first two years of a potential ten-year $1.5 billion contract with Wellpath to provide comprehensive medical, dental, pharmacy and mental health services for inmates and offenders in the custody of the Department of Corrections.

The panel approved the review of the contract on Tuesday after some lawmakers tried to hold it over concerns that pricing was not considered for all vendors during the procurement process. 

The Arkansas Board of Corrections approved the contract in July, but it must receive final approval from lawmakers. The Department of Corrections has contracted with Wellpath, previously known as Correct Care Solutions, for more than a decade. 

The company has been providing interim services since the previous contract ended in 2022. The current contract ends at the end of September, and if approved, the new contract would begin in October.

Arkansas lawmakers table corrections department medical contract

The contract faced pushback from lawmakers as recently as last month, when Senate President Pro Tempore Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs, tabled the proposal because he said a lot of his colleagues were out of town. He also questioned how large the contract was and noted his commitment to not relenting on the corrections department “until the Board of Corrections decides to start acting in some way.”

For nearly a year, the board has been at odds with the governor and the attorney general over expanding prison capacity and who has ultimate authority over Arkansas’ prison system. A lawsuit challenging the latter issue is ongoing. More recently, the prison board’s procurement practices have received scathing criticism from lawmakers.

Hester again raised the issue of cost at Tuesday’s meeting. Hester said he received a letter from Wexford Health, a vendor that said its proposed bid was less than Wellpath’s. 

Department of Corrections officials said a committee awarded technical scores for all five vendors that submitted proposals. The three with the highest scores advanced to the second round of scoring, at which point pricing was considered. Wexford Health was not in the top three and therefore its proposed price was not looked at. 

Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, said price should account for 30% of all vendors’ procurement scores, not just those that advance from the technical scoring portion. The process used in the corrections department’s Request for Proposal (RFP) process is not in the spirit of the law, Irvin argued. 

“Pricing is actually zero percent in this process, and I have a problem with that because you did not even look at the pricing proposals that were submitted by all of the vendors,” she said. “…I think that we have a flawed process to be honest because I feel like at this level of a contract anybody that’s going to apply for this is going to be able to deliver this service.

“And so, in my opinion, I think price should be a part of the initial consideration for anybody that submits a proposal.”

Tanya Freeman with the state Office of Procurement said unqualified vendors often do submit proposals just to gain experience. 

Regarding the Department of Corrections’ RFP process, Freeman said it, like many agencies, used a traditional method, which “abides by procurement law.” However, she noted that in recent years, OSP has shifted to the Most Advantageous Proposal (MAP) process, which does allow agencies to consider costs proposed by all vendors. 

“The traditional process that we always used up until a couple of years ago did withhold opening the pricing so it did not skew the evaluators’ technical scores,” she said.

Freeman said OSP recommended the MAP process to the corrections department when developing its RFP. Corrections Secretary Lindsay Wallace said they had to restart the process after Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders took office in 2023 due to the contract’s cost, so DOC chose to go with the traditional process with which staff was most familiar, she said.

DOC officials told lawmakers that of the three vendors that advanced to the second round of scoring, Wellpath had the lowest bid of $1.5 billion. The other two vendors’ bids were $1.9 billion and $2.1 billion. 

Sen. Jimmy Hickey, R-Texarkana, said the traditional process used by the department of corrections circumvents procurement law, which he said legislators spent months studying before approving new legislation a few years ago.

“I guarantee that was never, ever the intent of this legislature whenever it passed that … to figure out a way to circumvent the things that we don’t even consider their price, which as some of our other legislators have said is all coming out of tax-paid money, is past ridiculous to me,” Hickey said.

“And I know I get pretty aggravated down here, but we literally, literally had a year’s worth of meetings to try to get this procurement process right, and then this is the type [of[ stuff we hear? It’s very aggravating.” 

The committee approved a motion by Irvin requesting a report from OSP and the Bureau Legislative Bureau on how the RFP process used by the corrections department began and under whose authority. Legislators also approved her request that any contract using this process in the future be flagged when presented to ALC’s Review subcommittee. 

Irvin’s peers, however, did not approve her motion to hold the contract until Friday’s meeting of the full Arkansas Legislative Council. The contract was marked reviewed and will advance to Friday’s meeting, where Sen. Ben Gilmore, R-Crossett, said Tuesday that he intends to make a motion to pull it from further discussion.