Paul Fox,

I have to chuckle when I read some of this.

"the patient allowed our facility to share information with you while he or she was living,"

Yeah, right. Back nearly 100yrs or more ago, no one would even have thought to ask the patient to give permission because all this red tape & legal CYA regulations were never even dreamed of in the wildest of anyone's imaginations!

And, these people were in a mental hospital so in the legal world, they were not legally competent to have given permission even if someone had thought to ask them back a century ago.

Assuming other gov't agencies in NY state have modified their policies pursuant to these federal regulations then...... Good Luck, too, w/#3. "If you are a family member of the deceased patient and the information from the patient's record is relevant to your own health care, we can release the information to your physician, provided the physician submits a written request to us on your behalf."

You might get cooperation or you might not. And if it's someplace like Port Jervis, NY, you've a better chance of getting hit in the head w/a meteorite as you read this.

I've 2 women d. Port Jervis, Orange Co. Both are blood related to me, sisters of my great-grandfather who happens to be the man who d. 1919 in the Manhattan Hospital.

Both these women died of some sort of cancer. One in 1930, the other in 1970. The one d. 1970 left no descendants so those of us descended from her siblings are the closest thing there ever will be to a direct descendant for her.

Where I'm going w/this is that my primary care physician is an advocate of building a Health Risk Assessment Profile to learn, in part via the causes of death on DCs, what medical issues might lurk in one's blood lines. This is so she can provide more proactive health care for her patients to possibly avoid those medical problems where life style changes now will be of benefit & keep a closer watch for those medical conditions, such as some cancers w/genetic predispositions, so that they can be caught almost as they appear when the chance for a cure is extremely high.

I want to get those DC's for those ladies not for genealogy. I have long ago learned everything that might be on the DCs of genealogical interest. I need them to add to my HRAP.

Do you think I or my physician can get both of those DCs??? Yes & no.

For the 1930 DC, if we knuckle under to the extortion & pay the higher genealogy fee of $22 for the 1930 DC, yes. But Port Jervis isn't going to let us have that DC for the lower official purposes fee of $10 not to me nor my physician sending a written request on her practice's letterhead.

The 1970 DC for the lady who had no children, HIPPA gets cited for me & my dr. can't get the DC either.

So we tried another tack.

We don't care which woman died of which cancer. All we want to know is what the 2 cancers were. That shouldn't be any sort of HIPPA or PII problem. Port Jervis still stonewalls the information.

It should be illegal for any agency/facility to withhold information germane to a person's healthcare as would be something like this be - the knowledge of what cancers a blood relative died of so it can be determined if those were environmentally caused cancers of no concern or if they were cancers w/a genetic predisposition that a primary care doctor should definitely have on their radar.

I hope they were the former but should one or both prove to be the latter & I or one of my children get affected by one of them where prior knowledge might have provided a different outcome, I will sue the cr*p out of Port Jervis for withholding that vital healthcare information.