Dr. Elchanan Bruckheimer isn’t about wasting money. He isn’t planning on throwing any lavishly catered medical conferences. He’s probably the sort of man who uses a tea bag at least twice.
That’s because, as engaging and humorous as the British-born Israeli can be, he can’t stop thinking about the financial bottom-line: Every $2,000 he collects allows him to save another child’s life.
“Opening a valve in a heart, that runs about $2,000. Fixing a hole in the heart is about $8,000, but the device costs $6,000. Now if the American company that makes it could only give us a break,” he says, his voice trailing off.
Bruckheimer, a pediatric cardiologist who heads the cardiac catheterization unit at Schneider Hospital in Petach Tikvah, seems to see life as something of a cribbage board; every $2,000 knocks the “lives” peg up another level. For a million dollars, he can save 500 children.
Bruckheimer is a pale man of average height with a toothy grin. His tweedy jacket and white knit yarmulke made him easy to spot in a crowded San Francisco hotel lobby.
Along with his colleague, Dr. Einat Birk, Bruckheimer was in the city recently for a seminar on placing valves in the heart via catheterization, and avoiding open-heart surgery (“Israeli technology,” he says proudly).
The doctors were very candid about their need to raise private funds to complete their dream of transforming Schneider Hospital into a hub for pediatric cardiology.
Schneider, a 14-year-old children’s hospital, walks a difficult line in Israel. While its doctors strive to provide care every bit as good as top American hospitals, they must do so with staffs and budgets far below U.S. standards.
Bruckheimer, for instance, supplements his income by serving as a pediatrician in his off-hours, and he personally performed more than 80 percent of the 510 catheterization procedures undertaken last year in his lab. He proudly announces that he and his colleagues can repair a hole in a child’s heart of up to four centimeters in width via a catheter that is only two millimeters in diameter, in the same tone of voice men use when discussing the Corvette Stingray sitting in the driveway.
Still, Schneider doctors run into a somewhat dicey situation when it comes to operations on young people hailing from the Palestinian territories, Israel’s neighboring countries or even further abroad. Under a socialized medical system, operations on non-Israeli citizens must be funded from an outside source.
Whenever foreign visitors ask him why he isn’t operating on more foreigners, Bruckheimer’s response is always the same — “Just bring me the patients.”
Bruckheimer and Birk have had problems attracting Eastern Europeans to the hospital due to concerns over terrorism in Israel. And though the hospital has operated on Palestinian, Jordanian and even Iraqi children, it requires “a quiet diplomacy,” in Birk’s words.
The doctors estimate that every year there are somewhere between 200 and 1,000 Arab children with heart defects who are treated at inferior hospitals — or not at all.
It’s a shame, says Birk, because with a minimum of wrangling, these children could be brought to Israel. A month ago, she says, she managed to have a sick Palestinian child from the West Bank on the operating table within 12 hours of making her first phone call.
“Relief organizations can cover [the costs],” Bruckheimer says. “I don’t know why they don’t.”
For more information about Schneider Hospital, call Medical Development for Israel at (800) 556-5327 or visit www.mdinyc.org.