Washington Post reports on how Part D is affecting nation’s mentally ill
ven among the incident reports crossing Craig Knoll’s desk weekly now, this one stood out: A 43-year-old client of Knoll’s mental health agency, a man who suffers from bipolar disorder, had come from his pharmacy frustrated to the point of meltdown. There were snags in his new Medicare drug plan. Of his four medicines, it would fill only two.
“I’m not going to take any of them anymore,” he yelled, according to the report by caseworkers. Before they could do anything, he grabbed the prescription bottles he’d just gotten, ran for the restroom and dumped both in the toilet.
“He flushed everything he had on hand,” recounted Knoll, executive director of Threshold Services in Silver Spring, whose staff spent day after day last month grappling with the many ramifications of the government’s troubled program. Threshold came to the rescue of clients who couldn’t get any medications or who, despite their pills, were in increasing distress because of all the confusion. It reimbursed several who’d mistakenly paid hundreds of dollars for pills that should have cost them a few dollars — and replenished the supply of the client who had thrown his away.