Tim Russert was a heart – attack candidate as far back as 1998, according to Dr. James Ehrlich, medical director at Heart Check Washington, which imaged Russert 10 years ago.
Technicians stuffed Russert inside an electron beam computed tomography machine. The machine, which measures arterial calcium buildup, gave Russert a score of 210. A good score is under 10.
“When he came into our center in 1998, he was at a similar risk as a person who had already had a heart attack,” Ehrlich told me.
Ehrlich is also medical director of Colorado Heart & Body Imaging in Denver. I first met him in 2004 after having my own heart scanned at a competing clinic.
Like Russert, I sit at a desk every day working on what could be a heart attack. My score was 11, but that was four years ago. I should get it checked again, but the test costs $395 and insurance companies won’t pay for it.
Imagine this. General Electric, which owns NBC, where Russert worked, makes $1.6 million EBCT machines to painlessly check people for plaque. But when employees of GE companies go to get one of these tests, their GE-sponsored health insurance doesn’t cover it.
Insurers have long classified the test as experimental. This not only serves as an economic barrier but discredits the technology to the point where many physicians won’t recommend it.
“The scientific research is unproven,” said Cheryl Randolph, spokeswoman for UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest managed-care payers.
Medicare will pay for this test in some cases but has expressed concern that the tests sometimes are done on people with no signs of heart disease, unnecessarily exposing them to radiation risk.
Dr. Matthew Budoff of the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center wrote the expert-consensus article on heart scans in 2006. He concluded the technology will save lives and money.
“The simple economics of coronary calcium scanning will save significant costs to health care,” Budoff e-mailed me Monday.
For example, people with high cholesterol may not need expensive cholesterol-lowering drugs if tests show their arteries are clean.
A heart scan also can show if treatment is actually working.
“If Tim Russert had come back for another test, his score would have been over 2,000,” said Ehr lich. “That would have alarmed his doctors and increased his compliance” with his treatment.
Instead, we hear reports that Russert passed a stress test with flying colors six weeks before his sudden and unexpected death.
Russert’s life came to the same end as Wendy’s Dave Thomas, Enron’s Ken Lay and a runner named Jim Fixx, who seemed so fit. These are just celebrity faces of a tragedy that happens daily.
“About 25 percent of Americans over 50 are at similar risk that Tim Russert was in 1998,” according to Ehrlich, “and yet their doctors don’t know who they are.”
Ehrlich says the stance managed-care providers have taken is killing thousands of people a year.
Bruce Friedman, president of Heart Check Washington, alleges these companies don’t want to know about customers in the advanced stages of heart disease because they fear it could lead to more angioplasties and other expensive procedures.
It’s cheaper if people needing this kind of work just fall over dead.
“It’s a business decision,” Friedman said. “It’s cold.”
Al Lewis: alewis@denverpost.com
