My Journey Through Tijuana for the Best Surgery $2,000 Can Buy

Orthopedic surgery would have bankrupted us in the United States. So we went to Mexico instead.

“Holy shit,” my husband said when he saw the doctor’s son pull over and park his car next to a small, concrete building in the neighborhood of Nueva Tijuana. The exterior paint of the clinic was peeling and there were bars on the windows. We parked and stared at the clinic silently without getting out of the truck. I’d hoped $2,000 for orthopedic surgery was going to buy us something a little nicer than this.

Five days earlier, Aaron and I drove the half-hour from our rental home in the Mexican beach community of Rosarito to Tijuana’s Zona Río to see what we could do about his ankle, which was broken in two places after a hard landing off of a step in the house. We pulled up to Hospital Angeles, which has a reputation among American tourists for being the best private hospital in the city. Valets greeted us in the parking lot. They let Aaron wait in our car by the entrance so he wouldn’t have to put any further strain on his injury. I hurried inside to see how soon I would be able to schedule an appointment with a doctor. Neither of us had health insurance.

We’d been living in Rosarito for two months. I was working as a freelance writer, and Aaron was an independent contractor in construction and roofing sales. For most of his adult life, Aaron didn’t have health insurance, instead paying cash when he got sick and using superglue to repair injuries that would have otherwise required stitches — a sort of DIY version of a procedure doctors actually do. The last time I shopped for health insurance was in 2017 when we were living in Texas. The cheapest plan I could find on the ACA marketplace cost around $700 a month — a significant bump from the $200 a month we’d paid when I’d had a staff job at a newspaper. The plan had poor reviews on HealthCare.gov and didn’t include the good hospital just a few miles from our home, where I would want to go in an emergency. I felt like I was about to set our money on fire. So we decided to go without insurance, especially since we were thinking about leaving Texas to take advantage of our flexible work situations.

That’s how we ended up living in northern Baja, joining the millions of people who commute between Tijuana and San Diego at the busiest international border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. Medical tourism is one of the leading industries connecting the two regions. Billboard ads for plastic surgeons tower over gridlocked traffic at the San Ysidro port of entry, where a doctor’s note has provided travelers access to a faster lane of traffic. Pharmacies advertising discounts on Viagra and other medications are strategically situated next to bars and restaurants on Tijuana’s tourist strip, Avenida Revolución. Chain pharmacies have doctors on duty who can perform basic checkups for the equivalent of a few dollars. Once, when I came down with a sinus infection, a pharmacist checked my throat and lungs for 50 pesos (around $3) and wrote a prescription for antibiotics that cost another $20. We did have vague plans to get on American insurance again, as soon as the right job opportunity opened up for either of us. In the meantime, Tijuana’s health care seemed like a solid, short-term backup plan.

Then Aaron broke his ankle in two places. A crowded public health clinic down the street from our house in Rosarito gave him an X-ray, put on a cast, and provided an extra copy of the scan on a disc, all for $15. The clinic didn’t have any crutches, but we found a pair at a grocery store nearby for only $30. Before we left, the nurses gave Aaron bad news: They could tell from the X-ray this break wasn’t going to heal by itself, and it would eventually require surgery. A nurse wrote down a list of hospitals we should visit in the area, marking the nicer ones with asterisks. I wasn’t exactly sure how getting major surgery without private insurance worked in Mexico, let alone in the United States. Between the two countries, I figured at least one of them would have a doctor who would be able to help us.

We pulled up to Hospital Angeles, which has a reputation among American tourists for being the best private hospital in the city. Valets greeted us in the parking lot.

Hurrying across the marble floor of Hospital Angeles, I approached a receptionist and explained that my husband needed ankle surgery. She gave me the names and office numbers of two different orthopedic specialists who happened to be in that day. I could just drop in, she said; a hospital staffer would get a wheelchair and bring my husband up once I made my selection. At that moment, I felt like we were part of the 1%, getting the best health care available in a country where we weren’t even citizens.

The first orthopedist’s office I scouted was empty, except for a receptionist who said the doctor would return in 20 minutes. The second office was busier, with around half a dozen patients and their families in the waiting room. The doctor was a middle-aged man dressed in worn cowboy boots and wearing a nice watch. He laughed with one of his patients about something. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to understand the joke, but what mattered to me is that they genuinely seemed to like each other. I called Aaron and told him I’d found his doctor.

Dr. Mario Armando Caloca sometimes strained to find the right words to say, but his English was much better than our Spanish. Pointing to the X-ray, he showed us exactly where he would use a metal plate and screws to reattach the bone. The procedure would cost us around $10,000. We sat in silence, disappointed. Armando Caloca explained that the Hospital Angeles charged higher fees than most, but that he also had admitting privileges somewhere else, where the total would only be $3,500. Still, we didn’t say anything. Finally, he said that there was yet another hospital where he could perform the surgery for a grand total of $2,000, his fee and the hospital’s fee included. We nodded in approval. The procedure was scheduled for a Saturday, five days later. He would send someone to meet us in the parking lot of Hospital Angeles and bring us over to the clinic on the day of surgery. In case we had any questions, he gave us his direct cellphone number.