| $140,000 for heart bypass surgery
HEALTH WATCH with ANNE HILTON Sunday, March 15 2009
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No one travelling from Valsayn and all points East, or Chaguanas and all points South to Port-of-Spain — and back every day needs telling that even a minor traffic accident can add an hour or more to the daily torture on what passes for highways in Trinidad. A major accident, involving a couple of container trucks overturned across both East and West lanes of the CR or the North South on the Uriah Butler highways brings traffic to a dead, and I do mean “dead” stop.
Compare your arteries to our highways with traffic flowing in to and out of Port-of-Spain every day… should anything interfere with the free flow of blood to your heart, you’re heading for trouble, when a piece breaks off the lump of ‘bad cholesterol’ on and in the artery wall to wedge itself across the artery and block the flow of life-giving blood to the heart . . .
We’ve all seen what happens on TV programmes from Marcus Welby and Dr Kildaire through St Elsewhere and ER to Grey’s Anatomy — there’s no need for me to write a graphic description of CPR or defibrillators — only supposing the victim of heart attack gets medical attention in time. Many don’t.
The lucky ones are those who get chest pains; they go to see the doctor hoping it’s gas — and find out it isn’t. And yet — how lucky are those “lucky ones”? Would you like to have to go through the diagnosis, the treatment, to keep heart disease at bay for as long as possible?
Put it another way, do you have enough health insurance to cover the treatment you need to save your life? If not, can you afford to wait for treatment on the Government Health Service?
Let’s see what it could cost you and your insurance company (remember, insurance doesn’t cover all your costs, you’re going to have to pay some, depending on what’s covered and what’s not on your health insurance policy). Tests leading up to an angiogram will set you back $2,500, the angiogram itself costs $9,500.
When you have an angiogram, your heart specialist opens a vein in your groin (usually, though not always, the femoral artery) inserts a catheter, a thin flexible tube, into the vein and threads the catheter up to the left side of the heart where he can inject a dye (through the catheter) that will show up on X-ray. The X-ray photographs show the doctor what’s wrong and where.
If the damage isn’t too bad the heart specialist may advise you have angioplasty — which involves another trip to Mount Hope, another catheter with a tiny “balloon” on the end inserted into a vein in the groin. When the catheter reaches the affected arteries around the heart the doctor blows up the balloon to flatten the deposits of LDL (Lousy) cholesterol back against the walls of the artery.
This procedure is going to cost you, or you and your health insurance, $96,000 if there’s only one artery to fix, or $18,000 each for a “stent” to open up a next artery, with up to but no more than three stents in all, (to clear, if my maths don’t let me down, four arteries). This could bring your bill up to $150,000.
The patient feels much better, so much so that he (or she) might be tempted to abandon the low-fat, low salt, low cholesterol diet. Inevitably the arteries will clog up again, another angioplasty might fix that but without changing diet and lifestyle (taking regular exercise) sooner or later that patient is destined for a bypass and the surgeon’s knife.
A bypass involves serious although (so I’m assured) simple surgery. The surgeon opens up the chest, cutting through the sternum (breastbone), you’re put on a heart-lung machine for this open-heart surgery while the surgeon takes a vein from your leg and one, maybe from the other side of your chest and grafts them on to your affected coronary (heart) arteries to bypass the blockages.
This surgery is going to cost you and your health insurance around $140,000. Most patients recover quickly, some so quickly that they resume their risky lifestyles and ruinous diets until they have a second, even a third bypass. One bypass is enough for most people. The sensible patient takes the doctor’s advice, stops smoking before having an angioplasty or bypass, and after the surgery takes regular exercise and, above all, sticks to the heart patient’s diet — for life.
One ray of hope for those without medical insurance, if you’re able to wait six-12 months after the Ministry puts you on the waiting list for angioplasty or bypass (on the advice of your doctor) treatment is free …
We’ve all seen what happens on TV programmes from Marcus Welby and Dr Kildaire through St Elsewhere and ER to Grey’s Anatomy — there’s no need for me to write a graphic description of CPR or defibrillators — only supposing the victim of heart attack gets medical attention in time. Many don’t.
The lucky ones are those who get chest pains; they go to see the doctor hoping it’s gas — and find out it isn’t. And yet — how lucky are those “lucky ones”? Would you like to have to go through the diagnosis, the treatment, to keep heart disease at bay for as long as possible?
Put it another way, do you have enough health insurance to cover the treatment you need to save your life? If not, can you afford to wait for treatment on the Government Health Service?
Let’s see what it could cost you and your insurance company (remember, insurance doesn’t cover all your costs, you’re going to have to pay some, depending on what’s covered and what’s not on your health insurance policy). Tests leading up to an angiogram will set you back $2,500, the angiogram itself costs $9,500.
When you have an angiogram, your heart specialist opens a vein in your groin (usually, though not always, the femoral artery) inserts a catheter, a thin flexible tube, into the vein and threads the catheter up to the left side of the heart where he can inject a dye (through the catheter) that will show up on X-ray. The X-ray photographs show the doctor what’s wrong and where.
If the damage isn’t too bad the heart specialist may advise you have angioplasty — which involves another trip to Mount Hope, another catheter with a tiny “balloon” on the end inserted into a vein in the groin. When the catheter reaches the affected arteries around the heart the doctor blows up the balloon to flatten the deposits of LDL (Lousy) cholesterol back against the walls of the artery.
This procedure is going to cost you, or you and your health insurance, $96,000 if there’s only one artery to fix, or $18,000 each for a “stent” to open up a next artery, with up to but no more than three stents in all, (to clear, if my maths don’t let me down, four arteries). This could bring your bill up to $150,000.
The patient feels much better, so much so that he (or she) might be tempted to abandon the low-fat, low salt, low cholesterol diet. Inevitably the arteries will clog up again, another angioplasty might fix that but without changing diet and lifestyle (taking regular exercise) sooner or later that patient is destined for a bypass and the surgeon’s knife.
A bypass involves serious although (so I’m assured) simple surgery. The surgeon opens up the chest, cutting through the sternum (breastbone), you’re put on a heart-lung machine for this open-heart surgery while the surgeon takes a vein from your leg and one, maybe from the other side of your chest and grafts them on to your affected coronary (heart) arteries to bypass the blockages.
This surgery is going to cost you and your health insurance around $140,000. Most patients recover quickly, some so quickly that they resume their risky lifestyles and ruinous diets until they have a second, even a third bypass. One bypass is enough for most people. The sensible patient takes the doctor’s advice, stops smoking before having an angioplasty or bypass, and after the surgery takes regular exercise and, above all, sticks to the heart patient’s diet — for life.
One ray of hope for those without medical insurance, if you’re able to wait six-12 months after the Ministry puts you on the waiting list for angioplasty or bypass (on the advice of your doctor) treatment is free …
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