A federal judge has scolded California officials for failing to provide the billions of dollars a court-appointed receiver says is needed to upgrade the state's prison health care system.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson made it clear Monday he expects California to pay $8 billion for seven new inmate medical facilities. But he stopped short of immediately holding Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Controller John Chiang in contempt for failing to turn over the money.

Medical care in California's prisons is so bad it has been ruled unconstitutional. Henderson appointed a receiver to run the prison medical system after finding that an average of an inmate a week was dying from neglect or malpractice.

The judge says he is likely to order the state to pay $250 million as a first installment to demonstrate good faith.

J. Clark Kelso, the receiver, said he needs that amount to start designing three new medical and mental health units. Kelso said he will need more than $3 billion before July 1 to begin building them. The rest of the $8 billion would come in later years.

"He needs the money to run it and improve it," Henderson said as he repeatedly dismissed objections from the state's deputy attorney general.

He noted a sense of urgency to reform California's delivery of inmate medical care and said the price tag to fix it should not be an obstacle.

"Defendants' argument would seem to allow federal constitutional rights to be trampled any time a state decides it would cost too much money," he said at the opening of the hearing.

The judge said he suspects that "nothing more than political intermeddling" is blocking the state from paying the money. He criticized the Schwarzenegger administration for its "11th hour change of heart" in opposing prison health care facilities it had supported until recently. Continued...