Rolling Stone Reporter Not Noted For Her Journalistic Rigor Strikes Again, But That's Not My Question

A "journalist" who's been down this road before apparently helped whip up outrage about a innocent man accused of rape.
But, you know, it was a chance to get in some licks on an institution that stands against everything much of what Rolling Stone is for, so what difference did it make if it was all a lie, and if men went to jail while the liar made a financial killing, and had their reputations ruined, and died in prison?

What difference?

It served its purpose.

It's a horrible, horrible, ugly, ugly story, and it's pretty completely covered in the linked Newsweek article, but I am left with one very off topic question.

How is a 67-year-old man suffering from heart disease handcuffed to a hospital bed, kept under armed guard, and possibly "denied a ... lifesaving heart operation"; when we are a society so solicitous of the welfare of our prison population that their elective sex-change operations are covered?

Maybe Pennsylvania is backward....
(Yes, I'm aware that that is not a trans-sexual, much less a prison inmate, but rather than marvelous Sean Bean. Or is it Seane Beane? or Swhawn Bhawn? Anyway, it's a joke. Just because it isn't funny doesn't mean it's not a joke.)