A Passage To India

[July 11th, 2007]

When doctors told Oregonian Jim Hamilton last November that he needed an emergency procedure to repair the vein leading to the left side of his heart, he flat-out refused because he knew he couldn't afford it. When they told him he could die on his way out the door, he dug his heels further into the ground.

"I know what a funeral costs," Hamilton, 53, recalls telling the doctors in Klamath Falls at Merle West Medical Center, now known as Sky Lakes. "I don't know what this procedure is going to cost."

Within weeks of that hospital visit, Hamilton underwent the surgery anyway. But not in Klamath Falls, where the uninsured brickmason runs a campground with his wife, Babe, also 53.

Instead, Hamilton flew 7,000 miles with his wife to New Delhi and had the damaged vein repaired for a pre-determined price of $8,000. The whole two-week trip, including airfare, five days in the Indian hospital and a side trip to the Taj Mahal, cost a total of about $16,000, compared with at least $50,000 for the procedure in Southern Oregon. The estimated savings was the equivalent of Hamilton's annual salary.

The experience in India, where nurses brought sandwiches from the Subway chain to Hamilton after he grew tired of Indian food, confirmed for Hamilton that the American healthcare system is broken—too complicated and too expensive. And he's not convinced his experience would have been much better, even if he had insurance. The best coverage he could possibly afford, he says, would be a bare-bones plan with a high deductible, and he suspects he would have had to pay out-of-pocket for much of his angioplasty under that scenario, too.

Regardless, he was amazed when, on his first day at the hospital in India, an employee there brought him a detailed list of the cost of all of the hospital's myriad procedures. A California-based company called Planet Hospital arranged Hamilton's trip to the private New Delhi hospital. (In India, public hospitals offer free care, but regular doctor's office visits are typically paid for out of pocket and private hospitals charge fixed fees.)

Hamilton's American horror story mirrors those in Sicko, which featured some of the 25,000 anecdotes emailed to Michael Moore by disgruntled patients.

Hamilton has not yet seen Sicko, and so far he's not inclined to trust a government-run, single-payer system such as Moore proposes. "I'm almost afraid to have our government do something, because they screw up everything they touch,'' he says. "But maybe they could help. Hope springs eternal."

As for Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden's plan, Hamilton's wife, Babe, says even the best ideas rarely survive Washington, D.C.'s politics. "By the time the bills are passed, they're so watered down," she says.