From a collaboration between Atlanta magazine and the Telegraph in Macon, Georgia. Max Blau’s reporting was supported by the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Margaret Pfohl and Jade Abdul-Malik contributed reporting:
CorrectHealth’s litigious history is emblematic of the profound challenges that come with treating inmates. Within the nation’s healthcare system, few populations are as vulnerable or complex as those behind bars, who are at the nexus of competing priorities. On the one hand, they are entitled to healthcare funded largely by taxpayers, but on the other, that same healthcare is being farmed out to private companies, who are incentivized to maximize profits. In some ways, Musso is a pioneer, not just recognizing the dysfunction of the system, but offering an answer to a fundamental problem that vexes county sheriffs: How do we provide quality care on the lowest possible budget?
What started as a simple curiosity became the business opportunity of a lifetime. At 40, Musso traded in the stability and safety of a hospital career to care for patients few wanted to treat. In doing so, he engineered an unlikely reinvention from an unremarkable physician into one of the South’s most influential correctional doctors. This improbable second act would enrich Musso—since 2000 his companies have secured more than $360 million in government contracts—and offer a textbook example of how to build and grow influence through political lobbying, philanthropic donations, and old-fashioned personal networking. His contacts even led him to become a doctor on site for executions, and to open an assisted living facility to treat aging parolees. But the steady rise of his medical empire has undoubtedly benefited from the lax oversight by the very governments that hire him.
