Product Description

A chilling real-life medical thriller, Coronary chronicles the story of two highly respected heart doctors who violated the most sacred principle of their profession: First, do no harm.

In the summer of 2002, fifty-five-year-old John Corapi, a Catholic priest with a colorful background, visited Dr. Chae Hyun Moon, a celebrated cardiologist in Redding, California. Corapi had been suffering from exhaustion and shortness of breath, and although a physical examination and a conventional stress test revealed nothing abnormal, Moon insisted that the calcium level in Corapi's coronary arteries called for a highly invasive diagnostic test: an angiogram. A chain-smoking Korean immigrant known for his gruff bedside manner, Moon performed the procedure briskly and immediately handed down a devastating diagnosis: "I'm sorry; there is nothing I can do for you. You need a triple bypass tomorrow morning." He then abruptly left the room.

Several hours later, however, Moon inexplicably decided the surgery could wait until Corapi returned from a previously scheduled cross-country trip. Unnerved by the dire diagnosis and also by Moon's inconsistent statements, Corapi sought other opinions. To his amazement, a second, third, and fourth doctor found that his heart was perfectly healthy. In fact, for a man his age, Corapi's arteries were remarkably free of disease.

Sensing a cause more disturbing than human error, Corapi took his story to the FBI. As local agent Mike Skeen soon discovered, Corapi was one of a number of people who had suspicions about Moon and Moon's go-to cardiac surgeon, Dr. Fidel Realyvasquez, an equally respected member of the close-knit northern California community. Working at a hospital owned by Tenet Healthcare, Moon would make the diagnoses and Realyvasquez would perform the surgeries. Together, these leaders of the Redding medical establishment put hundreds of healthy people at risk, some of whom never recovered. Soon Skeen launched a major investigation, interviewing numerous doctors and patients, and forty federal agents raided the hospital where the doctors worked.

A timely and provocative dissection of America's medical-industrial complex, Coronary lays bare the financial structures that drive the American healthcare system, and which precipitated Moon's and Realyvasquez's actions. In a scheme that placed the demands of Wall Street above the lives of its patients, Tenet Healthcare rewarded doctors based on how much revenue they generated for the corporation.

A meticulous three-year FBI investigation and hundreds of civil suits culminated in no criminal charges but a series of settlements with Tenet Healthcare and the doctors that totaled more than $450 million and likely put an end to Moon's and Realyvasquez's medical careers. The case's every twist and turn is documented here.

A riveting, character-rich narrative and a masterpiece of long-form journalism, Coronary is as powerful as it is alarming. This is a hair-raising story of the hundreds of men and women who went under the knife, not in the name of medicine, but of profit and prestige. Brilliantly told, Stephen Klaidman's Coronary is a cautionary tale in the age of miracle medicine, and a shocking reminder to always get a second opinion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #601382 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Father John Corapi, a former accountant, was urged in 2002 to have immediate triple bypass surgery at Redding Medical Center. In fact, his coronary arteries were normal, and he and a former colleague persuaded the FBI to launch a criminal fraud investigation against the for-profit hospital, a renowned Northern California medical institution, and its two rainmakers, cardiologist Chae Hyun Moon and chief of cardiac surgery Fidel Realyvasquez. It soon became clear that the egotistical, abrasive, chain-smoking Moon and the highly ambitious, self-promoting Realyvasquez were performing numerous unnecessary procedures on gullible patients, with devastating consequences. Among the egregious examples of medical misconduct were unnecessary bypasses performed on Paul Alexandre, who became an invalid at age 36 after his sternum was permanently damaged during surgery, and on Shirley Wooten, a lively golden-ager whose surgery led to a fall that caused a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. Although it suffers from veteran newsman Klaidman's (Saving the Heart) lack of access to Moon and Realyvasquez, this well-researched and ably written account offers solid proof that American medicine is indeed "a mess." Readers may think the same about the legal system after learning that Alexandre and Wooten received only six-figure settlements while the Corapi walked away with millions, and neither doctor was prosecuted for a crime. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
If veteran journalist Klaidman wanted to show how to corrupt an already faulty medical system, he couldn't have chosen a better subject than the Redding (California) Medical Center scandal. All it took was a hospital owned by a multibillion-dollar corporation, Tenet Healthcare; two overly ambitious physicians; and thousands of people, including private insurers and Medicare personnel, willing to overlook questionable diagnoses. Millions were paid out for thousands of unnecessary bypass surgeries and other equally unjustifiable procedures. The compensation of cardiologist Chae Hyun Moon and cardiac surgeon Fidel Realyvasquez were directly tied to the profits of the hospital's heart program. And dozens of misdiagnosed patients suffered irreparable damage to their health, including death. Klaidman shows, too, a judicial system that allowed the physicians to walk away--no criminal charges were filed--and awarded cash settlements to victims and their families that, in the end, amounted to little more for the corporation than the cost of doing business. A story that grabs like fiction but frightens like fact. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Stephen Klaidman is a former editor and reporter for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune. He was a senior research fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and a senior research associate at the Institute for Health Policy Analysis, Georgetown University. He is also the author of Saving the Heart: The Battle to Conquer Coronary Disease, Health in the Headlines, and The Virtuous Journalist (with Tom Beauchamp). He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Customer Reviews

must read for locals
This was a relatively fair telling of the RMC scandal that hit our community a few years back. Klaidman tries to present a complete picture of the main players to the readers and for those who are familiar with the story and the area, it is fascinating. I don't think he was fair, however, in saying that the local public was oblivious to what was going on. Many of us were quite aware of the overdiagnosis and excessive sugery but were only able to steer those we knew away from Moon and RV. We felt pretty powerless to stop a huge corporation and it's power-hungry minions.

Fantastic book...Scary Story
This book reads easily, is full of suspense and intrigue like a novel. It is so amazing that this could have gone on! Being an RN myself, I can't imagine the total lack of peer review that apparently was the norm at RMC. My mother is also an RN who worked there with Moon and says the author's account of him rings absolutely true to her. This book needs to be read by more of the public to help them understand the mess the healthcare industry is and how important it is to be knowledgeable healthcare consumers. A big thanks to Klaidman for laying out this convoluted story in such a readable way!

Interesting
In October 2002 Tenet Healthcare headquarters was stunned to learn that 600 FBI agents had just raided one of their hospitals in Northern CA, seizing documents, computers and other information for a whistleblower lawsuit that accused two highly-respected cardiac physicians of performing thousands of unnecessary, highly invasive surgeries on relatively healthy people in order to drive up the hospital's revenue. This book is a blow-by-blow description of those events.

Certainly subjective in its approach - telling all from the side of the doctors, patients, the FBI and the pile of plaintiff attorneys - it's nevertheless a compelling look at how the business of healthcare - and it is a business - has to walk a very fine line between the need to operate that business profitably and the obligation to provide quality, ethical healthcare at the same time. It's also a rather scary look at just how significantly members of the medical community differ from one another when it comes to diagnosis, treatment, and the clinical environment.

Years later, the community of Redding and the healthcare community at large are still sharply divided over what all really happened at this hospital, and there's so much we'll never know. There are some reviewers on Amazon (notably, two of the main doctor's relatives, so not exactly objective) who claim that the book is basically a work of fiction, about people making hysteria-driven accusations that were soon fueled even further by the fat pot of financial awards, but it's not quite that simple. I found the author's style slightly sensational, but not overly so and I expected that going in. This was a very broad and complicated series of events and he really only had one side of the story.