Chip and Gail Angell would have paid any price to save their son.
They weren’t given the chance.
Their 39-year-old son Chris, who suffered from schizophrenia, refused to allow his doctors to talk to his parents, even though they were his primary caregivers.
So the Angells weren’t able to correct their son’s medical chart, which incorrectly listed the young man as uninsured. They weren’t able to plead with doctors not to base their son’s treatment on cost.
“Whenever we tried to get Chris into the hospital, we always ran into the fact that doctors wouldn’t talk to us,” says Chip Angell, of Brooklin, Maine, who says his son’s doctor never returned his calls. “Some doctors think they’re protecting the privacy rights of the patient. Others simply use privacy as an excuse because they don’t want to talk to someone with an idea contrary to their own, or because they can’t be bothered to call someone back.”
Although a federal law on patient privacy was written to protect patients’ rights, the Angells and a growing number of mental health advocates say the law has harmed the care of adults with serious mental illness, who often depend on their families for care, but don’t always recognize that they’re sick or that they need help.
[For more of this story, written by Liz Szabo, go to http://www.usatoday.com/story/...milies-say/80880880/]
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