60 Minutes (1968) s45e10 Episode Script
Claims Against a Hospital Chain | Shin Dong Hyuk | Bertrand Piccard & Abdre Borschberg
If you want to know why health care costs so much in this country, consider this, it's estimated that $210 billion a year -- about towards unnecessary tests and treatments and a big chunk of that comes right out of the pockets of American taxpayers in the form of Medicare and Medicaid payments.
For more than a year, we have been looking into the admission and billing practices of Health Management Associates.
It's the fourth largest for-profit hospital chain in the country with revenues of $5.
8 billion last year, nearly half of that coming from Medicare and Medicaid programs.
We talked to more than 100 current and former employees and we heard a similar story over and over: that HMA relentlessly pressured its doctors to admit more and more patients -- regardless of medical need -- in order to increase revenues.
Health Management Associates owns 70 hospitals in 15 states.
It's thrived buying small, struggling hospitals in non-urban areas, turning them into profit centers by filling empty beds.
Generally speaking, the more patients a hospital admits, the more money it can make, a business strategy that HMA has aggressively pursued.
Steve Kroft: Did you feel the hospital was putting pressure on doctors to admit people? Nancy Alford: Yes.
Steve Kroft: For what reason? Nancy Alford: Money.
Steve Kroft: You're sure of that? Nancy Alford: Uh-huh (affirm).
Until she was fired, Nancy Alford was director of case management at the HMA hospital in Mesquite, Texas, where she oversaw the auditing of patient records and signed off on the accuracy of bills sent to Medicare and Medicaid.
She'd never met former HMA doctors Jeff Hamby, Cliff Cloonan, and Scott Rankin until we brought them together in New York to discuss their experiences at HMA.
Scott Rankin: What's really remarkable is we're from very different areas of the country.
Yet, the pressures placed upon the emergency physicians and the mechanism in place to enforce those procedures and policies, exactly the same.
Cliff Cloonan is a retired colonel who spent the Carlisle Regional Medical Center in Pennsylvania as the assistant emergency room director.
Dr.
Scott Rankin worked in the same department.
Both say they were told by HMA and its ER staffing contractor, EmCare, that if they didn't start admitting more patients to the hospital, they would lose their jobs.
Cliff Cloonan: My department chief said, we will admit 20 percent of our patients or somebody's going to get fired.
Steve Kroft: What's wrong with admitting 20 percent? Scott Rankin: In a relatively rural, limited resource community hospital your admission rate out of the emergency department, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 percent.
Steve Kroft: And they wanted 20? Scott Rankin: Correct.
They wanted 20.
Cliff Cloonan: There's no way that you can do that and not have it be fraudulent because you're not admitting on the basis of medical requirements, you're basing it on strictly an arbitrary number that has been pulled out.
Steve Kroft: All sorts of businesses set quotas.
What's wrong with this? Scott Rankin: We're not building widgets.
We're taking care of patients who are ill and come in to the emergency department.
Jeff Hamby was an emergency room doctor at HMA's Summit Medical Center in northwest Arkansas.
He says he was fired for not meeting admission targets and is suing HMA for wrongful termination.
HMA maintains no one has ever been fired over admission numbers.
Hamby called the targets "coercion to commit fraud.
" Jeff Hamby: Initially it was 15 percent.
They kept trying to up it.
Steve Kroft: They didn't care how you got there? They just wanted you-- Jeff Hamby: Wanted us to hit the benchmark, arbitrary benchmark.
Steve Kroft: They're saying, "You will admit these people whether they're sick or not, whether they need to be hospitalized?" Scott Rankin: Correct-- Cliff Cloonan: They never phrase it that way.
They did say admit 20 percent.
The reality of that is that there's only one way that that can happen.
And that is if it is arbitrary.
That is, if you do admit patients that don't need to be admitted.
Scott Rankin: For patients who were 65 and over, the benchmark was 50 percent.
Steve Kroft: Those would be Medicare patients? Scott Rankin: Correct.
Steve Kroft: You're saying it's not a good idea to admit half the patients over 65? Cliff Cloonan: If you are put into the hospital for reasons other than a good, justifiable medical reason, it puts you at significant risk for hospital-acquired infections and what we would refer to as medical misadventures.
These stories are echoed in many of the thousands of documents we examined, including emails like this one from a hospital executive in Durant, Okla.
, pressuring her staff during emergency room shifts.
[Graphic: "Only 14 admits so far!!!!!!! Act accordingly.
".]
And this email from an ER director at an HMA hospital in South Carolina to a new emergency room doctor.
[Graphic: "Every time a 65 year old or older comes in, I am already thinking, do they have some condition I can admit them for?".]
[Graphic: "We are under constant scutiny[sic.]
.]
.
" [Graphic: "I will be blunt I have been told to replace you if your numbers do not improve.
".]
Steve Kroft: In your dealings with HMA, did you ever get any sense that this was commercially driven? Jeff Hamby: Of course.
I can't imagine any other explanation to admit a percentage.
Nancy Alford: The administrators said that daily, frequently.
"We don't make any money if we do this.
We make more money if we do that.
" Steve Kroft: Admit more patients? Nancy Alford: Admit more patients, keep them longer.
Money was the chief motivator.
Steve Kroft: You're all saying this was codified, institutionalized at HMA? Scott Rankin: Absolutely, this was a well thought out plan.
It even relates to how they had control over us as emergency physicians.
That control, they say, was exerted with corporate wide computer software called Pro-MED which was installed in every emergency room.
HMA says it was designed and approved by medical experts to improve the quality of patient care.
But doctors, nurses, emergency room directors and hospital administrators told us that HMA customized the program to automatically order an extensive battery of tests -- many of them unnecessary -- as soon as a patient walked into the emergency room.
Jeff Hamby: The minute the chief complaint and their age was placed into that computer, that system ordered a battery of tests that was already predetermined.
Scott Rankin: This was prior to being seen by the treating physician.
And we would look at the chart and say, "Why was all this ordered?" The computer program also generated printed reports like this one evaluating each doctor's performance and productivity.
On this document the doctors who hit corporate admissions goals received praise from company managers.
Those who didn't knew it.
Cliff Cloonan: The primary purpose of the scorecard was to track how you were doing in terms of revenue generation based on number of tests ordered and number of patients admitted to the hospital.
Scott Rankin: It has nothing to do with patient safety and patient care.
It has everything to do with generating revenues.
They say that when a doctor decided send to an emergency room patient home, the computer would often intervene, prompting the doctor to reconsider.
Jeff Hamby: The minute I hit "Home", it says, "Qual Check.
" And then it comes up with a warning, "This patient meets criteria for admission.
Do you want to override?" Steve Kroft: What was the reaction from the administrators if you overrode the computer? Jeff Hamby: It was like being called to the principal's office.
Cliff Cloonan: Mind you, this is coming from a non-physician, somebody who never went to medical school, never did a residency.
Frankly, has never seen or treated a patient, is telling a physician how they should be taking care of a patient and making decisions related to a patient.
And my blood pressure's going up just saying this.
In August, a former executive vice president of the hospital chain - John Vollmer - testified under oath in a deposition, that HMA's aggressive admission policies came directly from the top: CEO Gary Newsome.
[John Vollmer: Mr.
Newsome's thought was that an average of 16 percent was accomplishable at all hospitals or more and we should seek to do that and make that happen.
.]
Vollmer, who was also fired by HMA, became angry when the company lawyers challenged him.
[John Vollmer: I did my duty by informing HMA that what they are doing is wrong.
You can't require them all to have 16 percent admission rates and beat up doctors and administrators and all these folks over it when you are doing it to increase your revenue for the facility.
HMA attorney: I'm going to move to strike what you just said.
.]
We wanted to talk with Gary Newsome, Health Management Associate's CEO, but instead we were given HMA executive vice president Alan Levine, who joined the company just two years ago.
Levine says the allegations are coming from disgruntled employees.
And if they were true, he said, it would be reflected in the admissions data.
He says admission rates haven't changed in four years and are near or below industry averages.
Steve Kroft: The allegations has to do with you taking people who shouldn't be admitted to the hospital and putting them in the hospital.
Alan Levine: Those allegations are absolutely wrong.
Steve Kroft: HMA doesn't set quotas for hospital admissions? Alan Levine: No.
Steve Kroft: HMA never told emergency rooms that they needed to admit a certain percentage of people that came in? Alan Levine: We tell them collaboratively that our goal is to make sure the patient gets in the right setting.
It-- we don't want a patient going home that should be admitted.
We don't want a patient admitted that shouldn't be admitted.
Steve Kroft: I've got some documents here from Durant, Oklahoma.
We showed Levine this physician performance review from the HMA hospital in Durant, Okla.
, which had been given to us by a doctor there.
It prominently shows an admission goal of Steve Kroft: It says there on the right hand side, goal, 20 percent.
And it shows the lights.
The reds show people who are not actually meeting their goal.
Alan Levine: Well, first of all, I've never seen this document, so I can't-- I mean, you-- the-- I can tell you right now, as a company-- well, there's a lot of things on this form, Steve.
We look at testing guidelines.
There's a lot of quality metrics on here, Steve.
We measure all of this stuff-- Steve Kroft: Yeah, but there-- we have here one whole column, goal.
Alan Levine: That's not-- Steve Kroft: Goal.
Alan Levine: That's not-- that's not from our company, Steve.
I don't know where that came from-- Steve Kroft: It's not from your company? It's-- I don't-- one of your hospitals.
Alan Levine: Steve, we don't have any kind of goals.
I don't know what the percent admissions are at that hospital.
Maybe they are actually at any hospital is driven only by what the normal trend is for that hospital.
Steve Kroft: We talked to a hundred people who say that there was pressure from the corporate level to admit people.
Are they all lying? Alan Levine: Steve, we have one goal.
And-- and-- and I'm not gonna-- I'm not-- I'm not going to judge anybody else.
Our goal is each and every patient that comes into the hospital is a unique and special circumstance.
Hardly anyone we talked to complained about the quality of care at HMA hospitals, only the quantity of care.
And we were not the first to raise the subject of inappropriate admissions with corporate executives.
Paul Meyer raised the allegations several years ago.
At the time, he was director of compliance with HMA, charged with inspecting and auditing its hospitals to make sure they were following state and federal laws.
Meyer is a former had been supervising Medicare fraud in Miami before he joined HMA.
Steve Kroft: HMA has said that their admission policies are designed to improve the quality of care for the patients.
Do you believe that? Paul Meyer: Based on my experience, I-- I can't believe it.
Steve Kroft: What do you think they're based on? Paul Meyer: I think they're based on profit.
Meyer says he reached that conclusion in 2010 after hearing complaints from emergency room doctors, case workers and hospital administrators.
They said they were being pressured to fill beds with people who did not need to be admitted to the hospital.
Meyer says he audited four hospitals in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma and concluded that HMA had intentionally billed Medicare and Medicaid for hundreds of thousand of dollars in inappropriate hospital stays that did not meet government standards for admission or reimbursement.
Steve Kroft: Did you think it was Medicare fraud? Paul Meyer: Yes.
It was Medicare fraud.
Simple as that.
Steve Kroft: Why was it Medicare fraud? Paul Meyer: They're submitting bills to the government for the admission of patients.
The patients didn't meet the appropriate prescribed criteria for admission and for the hospitals to bill Medicare for the admissions.
It's a false billing, if you will.
Steve Kroft: If you'd been at the FBI and somebody came in and handed you all of this stuff, would you have pursued a criminal investigation? Paul Meyer: Yes.
No doubt about it.
Meyer says he told the same thing to corporate officials and wrote up his findings in three memos to top management.
Paul Meyer: I made sure that I spoke with the CEO face to face about this, that something is really, really wrong, and it's got to be addressed.
I had indicated that if its not addressed by you all, then I'll have to handle getting it addressed by the government.
Steve Kroft: What was their response? Paul Meyer: Had another job change.
Meyer says HMA's corporate attorneys heavily edited his reports and instructed him to destroy the original version of his memos, but he never did.
Paul Meyer: I felt it was evidence.
These people are changing my write-up of what I found, softening it up, excising out things, labeling it as attorney/client privilege when it wasn't.
And I felt certain they're trying to cover this up.
He was eventually fired and is now suing HMA for wrongful termination.
Steve Kroft: What are we supposed to make of these allegations that have been raised by Paul Meyer? He says this company's guilty of Medicare fraud.
Alan Levine: Well, we'll let-- we'll let the proper authorities be the judge of that.
Okay, we feel that we are doing the right thing for our patients.
It's not Mr.
Meyer's place to decide guilt or innocence.
We investigate anything that's reported.
And if we find a problem we fix it.
Steve Kroft: Are you saying that Paul Meyer doesn't recognize Medicare fraud when he sees it? Alan Levine: I think his assertions were not accurate.
I think he provided incomplete information in the course of doing his own investigations.
But it-- at the end of the day, I'm not going to question Mr.
Meyer.
Our goal is to get it right.
HMA says it hired an outside law firm to investigate Meyer's allegations, and that there was no finding that would support an allegation of fraud, adding that any overpayments from Medicare and Medicaid were rectified.
But Paul Meyer is the least of HMA's problems right now.
The hospital chain is currently under investigation by the Justice Department, which has subpoenaed records pertaining to the management of its emergency rooms and its computer software program Pro-MED, which HMA has stopped using.
The hospital chain says it is cooperating fully with the investigation and has nothing to hide.
Tonight we're going to tell you about a place so brutal and horrific it's hard to believe it exists.
It is, by all accounts, a modern-day concentration camp, a secret prison hidden in the mountains, 50 miles from North Korea's capital, Pyongyang.
It's called Camp 14, and according to human right rights groups, it's part of the largest network of political prisons in the world today.
Some 150,000 people are believed to be doing hard labor on the brink of starvation in these hidden gulags.
But it's not just those who have been accused of political crimes; it's their entire families -- grandparents, parents, and children.
A practice called "three generations of punishment.
" Very little was known about Camp 14 until a young man showed up in South Korea with an extraordinary tale to tell.
His name is Shin Dong-hyuk and he said he had not only escaped from Camp 14, but he was born there.
He's believed to be the only person born and raised in the camps who's ever escaped and lived to tell about it.
Anderson Cooper: Did anybody ever explain to you why you were in a camp? Shin Dong-hyuk: No.
Never.
Because I was born there I just thought that those people who carry guns were born to carry guns.
And prisoners like me were born as prisoners.
Anderson Cooper: Did you know America existed? Shin Dong-hyuk: Not at all.
Anderson Cooper: Did you know that the world was round? Shin Dong-hyuk: I had no idea if it was round or square.
Camp 14 was all that Shin Dong-hyuk: says he knew for the first 23 years of his life.
These satellite images are the only glimpse outsiders have ever gotten of the place.
Fifteen thousand people are believed to be imprisoned here -- forced to live and work in this bleak collection of houses, factories, fields, and mines, surrounded by an electrified fence.
Anderson Cooper: Growing up, did you ever think about escaping? Shin Dong-hyuk: That never crossed my mind.
Anderson Cooper: It never crossed your mind? Shin Dong-hyuk: No.
Never.
What I thought was that the society outside the camp would be similar to that inside the camp.
Anderson Cooper: You thought everybody lived in a prison camp like this? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
Shin told us that this is the house where he was born.
His mother and father were prisoners whose marriage, if you could call it that, was arranged by the guards as a reward for hard work.
Anderson Cooper: Did they live together? Did they see each other every day? Shin Dong-hyuk: No.
You can't live together.
My mother and my father were separated and only when they worked hard could they be together.
Anderson Cooper: Did they love each other? Shin Dong-hyuk: I don't know.
In my eyes we were not a family.
We were just prisoners.
Anderson Cooper: How do you mean? Shin Dong-hyuk: You wear what you're given, you eat what you're given, and you only do what you're told to do.
So there is nothing that the parents can do for you and there's nothing that the children can do for their parents.
Anderson Cooper: This may be a very dumb question, but did you even know what love was for the first 23 years of your life? Shin Dong-hyuk: I still don't know what that means.
Love may have been absent, but fear was not.
In this building, a school of sorts, Shin says he watched his teacher beat a little girl to death for hoarding a few kernels of corn -- a violation of prison rules, which he and the other students were required to learn by heart.
Shin Dong-hyuk: If you escape, you would be shot.
If you try to escape or plan to escape, you would be shot.
Even if you did not report someone who is trying to escape, you would be shot.
The shootings took place in this field, he says.
The other prisoners were required to watch.
As frightening as the executions were, Shin considered them a break from the monotony of hard labor and constant hunger.
The prisoners were fed the same thin gruel of cornmeal and cabbage day-in and day-out.
They were so hungry, Shin says, they ate rats and insects to survive.
Anderson Cooper: So for 23 years you were always hungry? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
Of course.
We were always hungry.
And the guards always told us, "Through hunger you will repent.
" What Shin and his family were repenting for probably dates back to the Korean War, when two of his uncles reportedly defected to the South.
Shin believes that's why his father and grandfather were sent to Camp 14 and why he was supposed to live there until he died.
North Korea's first dictator Kim Il Sung instituted this practice of "three generations of punishment" back in the 1950s.
David Hawk: The idea is to eliminate this lineage-- to eliminate the family-- on the theory that if the grandfather was a counterrevolutionary, the father and the grandsons would be opposed to the regime, as well.
David Hawk is a human rights investigator who's interviewed dozens of former prisoners and guards from the six political prison camps operating in North Korea today.
David Hawk: The largest number of people in the prison camps are those who are the children or grandchildren of people considered to be wrongdoers or wrong thinkers.
Anderson Cooper: I've never heard of anything like that.
David Hawk: It's unique in the 20th or 21st century.
Mao didn't do it, Stalin didn't do it-- Hitler, of course, tried to exterminate entire families.
But in the post-World War II world, it's only Korea that had this practice.
North Korea denies it has any political prisons, but refuses to allow outside observers to inspect Camp 14 and other sites.
Anderson Cooper: There's no way to verify all the details of Shin's story.
Do you believe his story? David Hawk: Oh, sure.
His story is consistent with the testimony of other prisoners in every respect.
There's also physical evidence he carries around with him to this day.
The tip of his finger is missing.
He says it was chopped off as punishment when he accidentally broke a machine in a prison factory.
He also has serious scars on his back, stomach, and ankles, which he was willing to show us, but embarrassed to show on camera.
He says he received those wounds here, in an underground torture center.
He was tortured because his mother and older brother were accused of trying to escape.
He was just 13 years old at the time.
Anderson Cooper: Did they think that you were involved in the escape? Shin Dong-hyuk: I'm sure they did.
Anderson Cooper: How did they torture you? Shin Dong-hyuk: They hung me by the ankles.
And they tortured me with fire.
And from the scars that I have, the wounds on my body, I think they couldn't have done any more to me.
Shin says he tried to convince his interrogators he wasn't part of the escape plot.
He didn't know if they believed him until one day when they took him to that field used for executions.
Thousands of prisoners were already there waiting.
Shin Dong-hyuk: When I went to the public execution site I thought that I might be killed.
I was brought to the very front.
But that's where I saw my mother and my brother being dragged out and that's when I knew that it wasn't me.
Anderson Cooper: How did they kill your mother? Shin Dong-hyuk: They hung her and they shot my brother.
He speaks of it still without visible emotion, and admits he felt no sadness watching his mother and brother die.
He thought they got what they deserved.
They had, after all, broken the prison rules.
Blaine Harden: He believed the rules of the camp like gospel.
Blaine Harden is a veteran foreign correspondent who first reported Shin's story in The Washington Post and later wrote a book ["Escape from Camp 14," by Blaine Harden.]
about his life.
Anderson Cooper: He had no compass by which to judge his behavior.
Blaine Harden: He had a compass.
But the compass were the rules of the camp, the only compass he had.
And it was only when he was 23, when he met somebody from the outside, that that started to change.
Anderson Cooper: When he met Park.
Blaine Harden: When he met Park.
Park was a new prisoner Shin says he met while working in Camp 14's textile factory.
Unlike Shin, Park had seen the outside world.
He'd lived in Pyongyang and traveled in China, and he began to tell Shin what life was like on the other side of the fence.
Shin Dong-hyuk: I paid most attention to what kind of food he ate outside the camp.
Anderson Cooper: What kind of food he had eaten? Shin Dong-hyuk: A lot of different things.
Broiled chicken.
Barbecued pig.
The most important thing was the thought that even a prisoner like me could eat chicken and pork if I were able to escape the barbed wires.
Anderson Cooper: I've heard people define freedom in many ways.
I've never heard someone define it as broiled chicken.
Shin Dong-hyuk: I still think of freedom in that way.
Anderson Cooper: That's what freedom means to you? Shin Dong-hyuk: People can eat what they want.
It could be the greatest gift from God.
Anderson Cooper: You were ready to die-- just to get a good meal? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
He got his chance in January 2005, when he says he and Park were gathering firewood in this remote area near the electrified fence.
As the sun began to set, they decided to make a run for it.
Blaine Harden: And as they ran towards the fence, Shin slipped in the snow.
It was a snowy ridge, fell on his face.
Park got to the fence first and thrust his body between the first and second strands and pulled down that bottom wire and was immediately electrocuted.
Anderson Cooper: How did you get past him? Shin Dong-hyuk: I just crawled over his back.
Anderson Cooper: So you climbed-- you literally climbed over him? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yeah.
Yes.
He was a fugitive now in rural North Korea -- on the run in one of the poorest, most repressive countries in the world.
But that's not how it seemed to him.
Anderson Cooper: What did the outside world look like? Shin Dong-hyuk: It was like heaven.
People were laughing and talking as they wanted.
They were wearing what they wanted.
It was very shocking.
Anderson Cooper: How did you manage to get out of North Korea? Shin Dong-hyuk: I was just trying to get away from camp and I ended up going north.
And on the northern side people talked a lot about China.
Anderson Cooper: Did you know where China was? Shin Dong-hyuk: No.
Not at all.
It just happened that the way I was going was towards the border.
With amazing luck and cunning, Shin managed to steal and bribe his way across the border, and quietly work his way through China, where he would have been sent back if he was caught.
In Shanghai, he snuck into the South Korean consulate and was granted asylum.
In 2006 he arrived in South Korea with not a friend in the world.
He was so overwhelmed by culture shock and post-traumatic stress he had to be hospitalized.
More than seven years later, it's remarkable how far Shin's come.
He's 30 now, has made friends and built a new life for himself in Seoul, South Korea.
But old demons from Camp there was something he was hiding.
Two years ago, he finally confessed to author Blaine Harden.
Blaine Harden: When he first told me about the execution of his mother and brother, he didn't say that he had turned them in.
Anderson Cooper: You reported your mother and your brother? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
Anderson Cooper: What did you hope to get out of reporting your mother and your brother? Shin Dong-hyuk: Being full for the first time.
Anderson Cooper: More food? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
But the biggest reason was I was supposed to report it.
Anderson Cooper: Why was Shin tortured after ratting out his mother and brother? Blaine Harden: The guard who he ratted out to did not tell his superiors that he got the information from Shin.
Anderson Cooper: So the guard basically was trying to claim credit? Blaine Harden: Yes.
It was only after seeing what family life was like outside Camp 14 that Shin says he started to feel guilt about what he had done to his own mother and brother.
Shin Dong-hyuk: My mother and brother, if I could meet them through a time machine I would like to go back and apologize.
By telling this story I think that I can compensate, kind of repent for what I did.
Repentance has taken Shin all over the world.
He speaks at human rights rallies, meets with U.
S.
congressmen and is telling his story to us in part because he's frustrated by how much attention the press pays to North Korea's new leader Kim Jong Un and his wife and how little attention gets paid to the people in the camps.
In South Korea, he and some friends started an Internet talk show designed to tell the world what's really going on in the North.
As for that taste of freedom he risked his life for he can eat all the broiled chicken he wants now.
But admits it hasn't given him the satisfaction he'd hoped for.
Shin Dong-hyuk: When I eat something good, when I laugh with my friends or, you know, when I make some money, I'm excited.
But that's only momentary.
And right afterwards I start worrying again.
Anderson Cooper: You worry about what now? Shin Dong-hyuk: What I worry about now is all of those people in the prison camps.
Children are still being born there and somebody is probably being executed.
Anderson Cooper: Do you think about that a lot? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
In 1903, the Wright brothers became the first men to fly.
Twenty-four years later, Charles Lindbergh became the first to fly over the Atlantic.
Coming soonanother possible breakthrough.
Two Swiss gentlemen have built a plane which they hope to fly across the United States next spring and then around the world without burning an ounce of fuel.
The plane is called Solar Impulse and it's powered entirely by the sun.
It is not the first solar airplane, but it is the first that can fly at night.
Thousands of solar cells on its wings transmit enough energy to batteries to keep it in the sky from sunset to sunrise.
Solar Impulse has already flown more than 2,500 miles from Switzerland to North Africa and back.
The goal: to make it around the world in 20 days and 20 nights.
["Solar Impulse you are cleared to proceed.
Have a good flight.
".]
It looks like it's flown straight out of Jules Verne.
It's so light it weighs less than an SUV and needs only 165 yards of runway to take off compared to over a mile for a commercial jet.
It has unnaturally long wings.
Rather than fly, the plane seems to glide, like a giant dragonfly.
The plane was created by Bertrand Piccard and his business partner, Andre Borschberg and if there ever was an odd couple, you're looking at them.
Andre is a pilot and an engineer but never worked on building an airplane.
Until six years ago, Bertrand didn't even know how to fly one.
He's a psychiatrist, an expert in hypnosis, and one of the most intense human beings we've ever met.
Bob Simon: We saw the plane take off and land last night.
Never seen anything like it.
Bertrand Piccard: An airplane like this doesn't exist anywhere else.
Bob Simon: And very recently, it existed nowhere but in your imagination.
Bertrand Piccard: Yeah, that's true.
If Piccard was the dreamer, he relied on his partner Borschberg to be the nuts and bolts guy.
Piccard knew he wanted to build something that could fly without using fossil fuels.
That was the goal.
But he couldn't explain -- and didn't even know -- what that something was going to be.
Andre Borschberg: Was this going to be an airplane? Was this going to be an air ship? Was this going to be a mixture of these solutions, so lighter than air, or something flying? Piccard and Borschberg were a good team.
One could think outside the box.
The other could fly there.
Piccard started dreaming about the plane in 1999.
They raised $120 million from corporate sponsors and investors.
A test pilot in 2009 flew the plane for the first time.
It managed to rise only three feet off the ground and stayed airborne for just 28 seconds.
They called it the "flea hop.
" But it was a high-tech flea, built with extremely light-weight material made from carbon fibers.
The wheels are smaller than the wheels on a kid's tricycle.
This state of the art plane sometimes looks like it had been put together by a 6-year-old with an erector set.
Bob Simon: What is this? Bertrand Piccard: This is the carbon fiber piece that makes the profile of the air foil on the leading edge of the airplane.
Bob Simon: And this weighsnothing? Bertrand Piccard: 91 grams.
Andre Borschberg: A fifth of a pound.
Bob Simon: Has there ever been anything so light before? Bertrand Piccard: No, I don't think so.
And the solar cells are light too.
Other cells available were more efficient but weighed more, and the Solar Impulse team needed cells flexible enough to create the contour of the wings.
There are 12,000 of them.
Andre Borschberg: These solar cells make the surface of the wing.
So they are not glued on the surface.
They are the surface.
Bertrand Piccard: And these cells capture the energy of the sun and transform it into electricity.
And then this electricity goes simultaneously to the engines and to the batteries and then we will reach the next sunrise and capture the sun again.
And we can continue theoretically forever.
Almost all of the energy created by the cells ends up being used by the engines.
Compared to car engines that can waste 70 percent of the energy provided.
During the day, excess energy is stored in batteries -- batteries that are unusually efficient.
Piccard says all the materials can be used for more practical applications.
Bertrand Piccard: If we can fly in a solar airplane like Solar Impulse with no fuel, just on solar power, then all the technologies here can, of course, also be used in the daily life for cars, for houses, for heating systems, cooling systems and so on.
While the technology was being fine tuned, Andre spent months inside a simulator so he could learn how to fly the plane himself.
Then short flights to and from a military air base in Switzerland.
The Alps provided a breathtaking backdrop, but they weren't in it for the scenery.
They wanted altitude and distance.
They took it out of Switzerland to Belgium and Paris, where they created quite a stir flying by the Eiffel Tower.
But for once the French didn't complain.
Solar Impulse was so quiet and elegant.
But the biggest challenge was flying at night.
Were they ready? "Yes," said Piccard and he announced to the team that Andre would be in the cockpit.
[Bertrand Piccard: Andre will stay up there now as long as we can.
.]
And off he went, into the night.
For eight hours, Andre flew in darkness over Switzerland.
Andre could see nothing so the team on the ground had to track winds, squalls, battery levels.
Watching this creature in the air -- long after the sun has surrendered - is almost unreal.
The plane emerges from the darkness like an apparition.
Just before the sun peeked through the clouds, Bertrand counted Andre down to the dawn.
[Bertrand Piccard: Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
We made it! We made it guys! Andre you should be with us right now.
.]
Andre made it with power to spare and, just think, he could have taken off again without refueling.
Bob Simon: It must be a pretty good sensation when that sun comes up in the morning.
Andre Borschberg: It is, well certainly because of the beauty, I mean the sunset is gorgeous but the sunrise of course brings us the next day there.
It brings the hope again that you can continue.
Bertrand is continuing a family tradition --- visionaries, pioneers, adventurers.
His father, Jacques, designed a new fangled submarine, squeezed himself inside, and went down seven miles beneath the surface of the Pacific and came up to talk about it.
That was 50 years ago.
His grandfather, Auguste, decided to go the other way - up.
He'd heard the Earth was round, but wanted to see for himself.
So, he designed a pressurized cabin, attached it to a balloon and flew it to an altitude of 10 miles.
Bertrand Piccard: It was considered by NASA as the first man in space.
So in those days it was like going in another world.
Bob Simon: Was your grandfather in fact the first human being to see the curvature of the earth? Bertrand Piccard: Yes.
And that was really impressive for me as a kid because I was reading in the history books all the stories about the Earth being flat, being round or whatever.
And my grandfather came back and said, "I saw the curvature of the Earth with my eyes.
" So once you live this as a kid, of course, you want to continue into that field of exploration.
And he did.
In 1992, Bertrand entered and won the first ever trans-Atlantic balloon race.
Seven years later, he entered a much more demanding race, flying around the world in a balloon nonstop in three weeks.
Bertrand landed in the Egyptian desert just in time.
He was almost out of fuel, had almost fallen from the sky like Icarus.
His balloon capsule is now on display at the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington -- right there with the Wright Brothers plane, Lindbergh's plane, the Spirit of Saint Louis and the Apollo will eventually have a home here as well and he told us the inspiration for the airplane started with that balloon landing in the desert.
Bertrand Piccard: When I landed there, there were 40 kilos, 80 pounds of liquid propane out of the 3.
7 tons from the takeoff.
It was almost a failure due to the dependency on fuel and on that day I made a promise.
I made a promise that the next time I would fly around the world it would be with no fuel at all.
Earlier this year, they made their longest flights yet, from Switzerland to Spain and then across the Mediterranean to Morocco and back.
For the flight round the world they will be in the air 20 days and 20 nights with several stops so the pilots can take turns.
Bob Simon: Flying over the Swiss Alps is pleasant enough but think about it, I can't move, I can't stand up and, if you want to think about a really pleasant thought, the toilet is built into the seat so you've got to figure out how to do that one way or another.
Andre has already done this for 72 hours, but when the time comes for the big flight it'll take five days and five nights over the Pacific.
Nothing like that has ever been done in a plane before.
And there is nothing they can do now to make it less dangerous.
The plane is so light, a bad storm could dump it into the Pacific.
It likes the sun but isn't fond of clouds.
The cockpit is an oven by day and an ice box by night.
And the plane itself can be temperamental.
It flies well at 30 miles an hour, but can stall if the speed drops to 23.
And it can tip over when it lands, unless crew members on the tarmac run and grab onto the metal struts attached to the wings.
None of this seems to bother Bertrand Piccard, not with his genes and his laser-like focus.
Bertrand Piccard: Everything you do, you have to do it because you're well prepared and you're absolutely calm inside of yourself.
Bob Simon: You're also a psychiatrist.
Bertrand Piccard: Yes.
Bob Simon: Any mental devices, any tricks? Bertrand Piccard: Yeah, I use a lot of self-hypnosis.
Bob Simon: You can hypnotize yourself? Bertrand Piccard: Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Bob Simon: Like that? Bertrand Piccard: Little bit longer.
Twice instead of once.
Bob Simon: No, but I mean, you could-- at any time, if you're in the plane-- Bertrand Piccard: Yes.
Bob Simon: And you feel - I need to hypnotize myself now, you can do it? Bertrand Piccard: Yes, yes, absolutely.
Bertrand and Andre hope to fly from California to Virginia next year.
They are planning to fly around the world in 2015.
Bertrand knows it's unlikely a solar plane will fly commercially in his lifetime, but feels he has done something more than invent something new.
He has combined technology with poetry and proven what our ancestors knew thousands of years ago -- that the ultimate power is the sun.
For more than a year, we have been looking into the admission and billing practices of Health Management Associates.
It's the fourth largest for-profit hospital chain in the country with revenues of $5.
8 billion last year, nearly half of that coming from Medicare and Medicaid programs.
We talked to more than 100 current and former employees and we heard a similar story over and over: that HMA relentlessly pressured its doctors to admit more and more patients -- regardless of medical need -- in order to increase revenues.
Health Management Associates owns 70 hospitals in 15 states.
It's thrived buying small, struggling hospitals in non-urban areas, turning them into profit centers by filling empty beds.
Generally speaking, the more patients a hospital admits, the more money it can make, a business strategy that HMA has aggressively pursued.
Steve Kroft: Did you feel the hospital was putting pressure on doctors to admit people? Nancy Alford: Yes.
Steve Kroft: For what reason? Nancy Alford: Money.
Steve Kroft: You're sure of that? Nancy Alford: Uh-huh (affirm).
Until she was fired, Nancy Alford was director of case management at the HMA hospital in Mesquite, Texas, where she oversaw the auditing of patient records and signed off on the accuracy of bills sent to Medicare and Medicaid.
She'd never met former HMA doctors Jeff Hamby, Cliff Cloonan, and Scott Rankin until we brought them together in New York to discuss their experiences at HMA.
Scott Rankin: What's really remarkable is we're from very different areas of the country.
Yet, the pressures placed upon the emergency physicians and the mechanism in place to enforce those procedures and policies, exactly the same.
Cliff Cloonan is a retired colonel who spent the Carlisle Regional Medical Center in Pennsylvania as the assistant emergency room director.
Dr.
Scott Rankin worked in the same department.
Both say they were told by HMA and its ER staffing contractor, EmCare, that if they didn't start admitting more patients to the hospital, they would lose their jobs.
Cliff Cloonan: My department chief said, we will admit 20 percent of our patients or somebody's going to get fired.
Steve Kroft: What's wrong with admitting 20 percent? Scott Rankin: In a relatively rural, limited resource community hospital your admission rate out of the emergency department, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 percent.
Steve Kroft: And they wanted 20? Scott Rankin: Correct.
They wanted 20.
Cliff Cloonan: There's no way that you can do that and not have it be fraudulent because you're not admitting on the basis of medical requirements, you're basing it on strictly an arbitrary number that has been pulled out.
Steve Kroft: All sorts of businesses set quotas.
What's wrong with this? Scott Rankin: We're not building widgets.
We're taking care of patients who are ill and come in to the emergency department.
Jeff Hamby was an emergency room doctor at HMA's Summit Medical Center in northwest Arkansas.
He says he was fired for not meeting admission targets and is suing HMA for wrongful termination.
HMA maintains no one has ever been fired over admission numbers.
Hamby called the targets "coercion to commit fraud.
" Jeff Hamby: Initially it was 15 percent.
They kept trying to up it.
Steve Kroft: They didn't care how you got there? They just wanted you-- Jeff Hamby: Wanted us to hit the benchmark, arbitrary benchmark.
Steve Kroft: They're saying, "You will admit these people whether they're sick or not, whether they need to be hospitalized?" Scott Rankin: Correct-- Cliff Cloonan: They never phrase it that way.
They did say admit 20 percent.
The reality of that is that there's only one way that that can happen.
And that is if it is arbitrary.
That is, if you do admit patients that don't need to be admitted.
Scott Rankin: For patients who were 65 and over, the benchmark was 50 percent.
Steve Kroft: Those would be Medicare patients? Scott Rankin: Correct.
Steve Kroft: You're saying it's not a good idea to admit half the patients over 65? Cliff Cloonan: If you are put into the hospital for reasons other than a good, justifiable medical reason, it puts you at significant risk for hospital-acquired infections and what we would refer to as medical misadventures.
These stories are echoed in many of the thousands of documents we examined, including emails like this one from a hospital executive in Durant, Okla.
, pressuring her staff during emergency room shifts.
[Graphic: "Only 14 admits so far!!!!!!! Act accordingly.
".]
And this email from an ER director at an HMA hospital in South Carolina to a new emergency room doctor.
[Graphic: "Every time a 65 year old or older comes in, I am already thinking, do they have some condition I can admit them for?".]
[Graphic: "We are under constant scutiny[sic.]
.]
.
" [Graphic: "I will be blunt I have been told to replace you if your numbers do not improve.
".]
Steve Kroft: In your dealings with HMA, did you ever get any sense that this was commercially driven? Jeff Hamby: Of course.
I can't imagine any other explanation to admit a percentage.
Nancy Alford: The administrators said that daily, frequently.
"We don't make any money if we do this.
We make more money if we do that.
" Steve Kroft: Admit more patients? Nancy Alford: Admit more patients, keep them longer.
Money was the chief motivator.
Steve Kroft: You're all saying this was codified, institutionalized at HMA? Scott Rankin: Absolutely, this was a well thought out plan.
It even relates to how they had control over us as emergency physicians.
That control, they say, was exerted with corporate wide computer software called Pro-MED which was installed in every emergency room.
HMA says it was designed and approved by medical experts to improve the quality of patient care.
But doctors, nurses, emergency room directors and hospital administrators told us that HMA customized the program to automatically order an extensive battery of tests -- many of them unnecessary -- as soon as a patient walked into the emergency room.
Jeff Hamby: The minute the chief complaint and their age was placed into that computer, that system ordered a battery of tests that was already predetermined.
Scott Rankin: This was prior to being seen by the treating physician.
And we would look at the chart and say, "Why was all this ordered?" The computer program also generated printed reports like this one evaluating each doctor's performance and productivity.
On this document the doctors who hit corporate admissions goals received praise from company managers.
Those who didn't knew it.
Cliff Cloonan: The primary purpose of the scorecard was to track how you were doing in terms of revenue generation based on number of tests ordered and number of patients admitted to the hospital.
Scott Rankin: It has nothing to do with patient safety and patient care.
It has everything to do with generating revenues.
They say that when a doctor decided send to an emergency room patient home, the computer would often intervene, prompting the doctor to reconsider.
Jeff Hamby: The minute I hit "Home", it says, "Qual Check.
" And then it comes up with a warning, "This patient meets criteria for admission.
Do you want to override?" Steve Kroft: What was the reaction from the administrators if you overrode the computer? Jeff Hamby: It was like being called to the principal's office.
Cliff Cloonan: Mind you, this is coming from a non-physician, somebody who never went to medical school, never did a residency.
Frankly, has never seen or treated a patient, is telling a physician how they should be taking care of a patient and making decisions related to a patient.
And my blood pressure's going up just saying this.
In August, a former executive vice president of the hospital chain - John Vollmer - testified under oath in a deposition, that HMA's aggressive admission policies came directly from the top: CEO Gary Newsome.
[John Vollmer: Mr.
Newsome's thought was that an average of 16 percent was accomplishable at all hospitals or more and we should seek to do that and make that happen.
.]
Vollmer, who was also fired by HMA, became angry when the company lawyers challenged him.
[John Vollmer: I did my duty by informing HMA that what they are doing is wrong.
You can't require them all to have 16 percent admission rates and beat up doctors and administrators and all these folks over it when you are doing it to increase your revenue for the facility.
HMA attorney: I'm going to move to strike what you just said.
.]
We wanted to talk with Gary Newsome, Health Management Associate's CEO, but instead we were given HMA executive vice president Alan Levine, who joined the company just two years ago.
Levine says the allegations are coming from disgruntled employees.
And if they were true, he said, it would be reflected in the admissions data.
He says admission rates haven't changed in four years and are near or below industry averages.
Steve Kroft: The allegations has to do with you taking people who shouldn't be admitted to the hospital and putting them in the hospital.
Alan Levine: Those allegations are absolutely wrong.
Steve Kroft: HMA doesn't set quotas for hospital admissions? Alan Levine: No.
Steve Kroft: HMA never told emergency rooms that they needed to admit a certain percentage of people that came in? Alan Levine: We tell them collaboratively that our goal is to make sure the patient gets in the right setting.
It-- we don't want a patient going home that should be admitted.
We don't want a patient admitted that shouldn't be admitted.
Steve Kroft: I've got some documents here from Durant, Oklahoma.
We showed Levine this physician performance review from the HMA hospital in Durant, Okla.
, which had been given to us by a doctor there.
It prominently shows an admission goal of Steve Kroft: It says there on the right hand side, goal, 20 percent.
And it shows the lights.
The reds show people who are not actually meeting their goal.
Alan Levine: Well, first of all, I've never seen this document, so I can't-- I mean, you-- the-- I can tell you right now, as a company-- well, there's a lot of things on this form, Steve.
We look at testing guidelines.
There's a lot of quality metrics on here, Steve.
We measure all of this stuff-- Steve Kroft: Yeah, but there-- we have here one whole column, goal.
Alan Levine: That's not-- Steve Kroft: Goal.
Alan Levine: That's not-- that's not from our company, Steve.
I don't know where that came from-- Steve Kroft: It's not from your company? It's-- I don't-- one of your hospitals.
Alan Levine: Steve, we don't have any kind of goals.
I don't know what the percent admissions are at that hospital.
Maybe they are actually at any hospital is driven only by what the normal trend is for that hospital.
Steve Kroft: We talked to a hundred people who say that there was pressure from the corporate level to admit people.
Are they all lying? Alan Levine: Steve, we have one goal.
And-- and-- and I'm not gonna-- I'm not-- I'm not going to judge anybody else.
Our goal is each and every patient that comes into the hospital is a unique and special circumstance.
Hardly anyone we talked to complained about the quality of care at HMA hospitals, only the quantity of care.
And we were not the first to raise the subject of inappropriate admissions with corporate executives.
Paul Meyer raised the allegations several years ago.
At the time, he was director of compliance with HMA, charged with inspecting and auditing its hospitals to make sure they were following state and federal laws.
Meyer is a former had been supervising Medicare fraud in Miami before he joined HMA.
Steve Kroft: HMA has said that their admission policies are designed to improve the quality of care for the patients.
Do you believe that? Paul Meyer: Based on my experience, I-- I can't believe it.
Steve Kroft: What do you think they're based on? Paul Meyer: I think they're based on profit.
Meyer says he reached that conclusion in 2010 after hearing complaints from emergency room doctors, case workers and hospital administrators.
They said they were being pressured to fill beds with people who did not need to be admitted to the hospital.
Meyer says he audited four hospitals in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma and concluded that HMA had intentionally billed Medicare and Medicaid for hundreds of thousand of dollars in inappropriate hospital stays that did not meet government standards for admission or reimbursement.
Steve Kroft: Did you think it was Medicare fraud? Paul Meyer: Yes.
It was Medicare fraud.
Simple as that.
Steve Kroft: Why was it Medicare fraud? Paul Meyer: They're submitting bills to the government for the admission of patients.
The patients didn't meet the appropriate prescribed criteria for admission and for the hospitals to bill Medicare for the admissions.
It's a false billing, if you will.
Steve Kroft: If you'd been at the FBI and somebody came in and handed you all of this stuff, would you have pursued a criminal investigation? Paul Meyer: Yes.
No doubt about it.
Meyer says he told the same thing to corporate officials and wrote up his findings in three memos to top management.
Paul Meyer: I made sure that I spoke with the CEO face to face about this, that something is really, really wrong, and it's got to be addressed.
I had indicated that if its not addressed by you all, then I'll have to handle getting it addressed by the government.
Steve Kroft: What was their response? Paul Meyer: Had another job change.
Meyer says HMA's corporate attorneys heavily edited his reports and instructed him to destroy the original version of his memos, but he never did.
Paul Meyer: I felt it was evidence.
These people are changing my write-up of what I found, softening it up, excising out things, labeling it as attorney/client privilege when it wasn't.
And I felt certain they're trying to cover this up.
He was eventually fired and is now suing HMA for wrongful termination.
Steve Kroft: What are we supposed to make of these allegations that have been raised by Paul Meyer? He says this company's guilty of Medicare fraud.
Alan Levine: Well, we'll let-- we'll let the proper authorities be the judge of that.
Okay, we feel that we are doing the right thing for our patients.
It's not Mr.
Meyer's place to decide guilt or innocence.
We investigate anything that's reported.
And if we find a problem we fix it.
Steve Kroft: Are you saying that Paul Meyer doesn't recognize Medicare fraud when he sees it? Alan Levine: I think his assertions were not accurate.
I think he provided incomplete information in the course of doing his own investigations.
But it-- at the end of the day, I'm not going to question Mr.
Meyer.
Our goal is to get it right.
HMA says it hired an outside law firm to investigate Meyer's allegations, and that there was no finding that would support an allegation of fraud, adding that any overpayments from Medicare and Medicaid were rectified.
But Paul Meyer is the least of HMA's problems right now.
The hospital chain is currently under investigation by the Justice Department, which has subpoenaed records pertaining to the management of its emergency rooms and its computer software program Pro-MED, which HMA has stopped using.
The hospital chain says it is cooperating fully with the investigation and has nothing to hide.
Tonight we're going to tell you about a place so brutal and horrific it's hard to believe it exists.
It is, by all accounts, a modern-day concentration camp, a secret prison hidden in the mountains, 50 miles from North Korea's capital, Pyongyang.
It's called Camp 14, and according to human right rights groups, it's part of the largest network of political prisons in the world today.
Some 150,000 people are believed to be doing hard labor on the brink of starvation in these hidden gulags.
But it's not just those who have been accused of political crimes; it's their entire families -- grandparents, parents, and children.
A practice called "three generations of punishment.
" Very little was known about Camp 14 until a young man showed up in South Korea with an extraordinary tale to tell.
His name is Shin Dong-hyuk and he said he had not only escaped from Camp 14, but he was born there.
He's believed to be the only person born and raised in the camps who's ever escaped and lived to tell about it.
Anderson Cooper: Did anybody ever explain to you why you were in a camp? Shin Dong-hyuk: No.
Never.
Because I was born there I just thought that those people who carry guns were born to carry guns.
And prisoners like me were born as prisoners.
Anderson Cooper: Did you know America existed? Shin Dong-hyuk: Not at all.
Anderson Cooper: Did you know that the world was round? Shin Dong-hyuk: I had no idea if it was round or square.
Camp 14 was all that Shin Dong-hyuk: says he knew for the first 23 years of his life.
These satellite images are the only glimpse outsiders have ever gotten of the place.
Fifteen thousand people are believed to be imprisoned here -- forced to live and work in this bleak collection of houses, factories, fields, and mines, surrounded by an electrified fence.
Anderson Cooper: Growing up, did you ever think about escaping? Shin Dong-hyuk: That never crossed my mind.
Anderson Cooper: It never crossed your mind? Shin Dong-hyuk: No.
Never.
What I thought was that the society outside the camp would be similar to that inside the camp.
Anderson Cooper: You thought everybody lived in a prison camp like this? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
Shin told us that this is the house where he was born.
His mother and father were prisoners whose marriage, if you could call it that, was arranged by the guards as a reward for hard work.
Anderson Cooper: Did they live together? Did they see each other every day? Shin Dong-hyuk: No.
You can't live together.
My mother and my father were separated and only when they worked hard could they be together.
Anderson Cooper: Did they love each other? Shin Dong-hyuk: I don't know.
In my eyes we were not a family.
We were just prisoners.
Anderson Cooper: How do you mean? Shin Dong-hyuk: You wear what you're given, you eat what you're given, and you only do what you're told to do.
So there is nothing that the parents can do for you and there's nothing that the children can do for their parents.
Anderson Cooper: This may be a very dumb question, but did you even know what love was for the first 23 years of your life? Shin Dong-hyuk: I still don't know what that means.
Love may have been absent, but fear was not.
In this building, a school of sorts, Shin says he watched his teacher beat a little girl to death for hoarding a few kernels of corn -- a violation of prison rules, which he and the other students were required to learn by heart.
Shin Dong-hyuk: If you escape, you would be shot.
If you try to escape or plan to escape, you would be shot.
Even if you did not report someone who is trying to escape, you would be shot.
The shootings took place in this field, he says.
The other prisoners were required to watch.
As frightening as the executions were, Shin considered them a break from the monotony of hard labor and constant hunger.
The prisoners were fed the same thin gruel of cornmeal and cabbage day-in and day-out.
They were so hungry, Shin says, they ate rats and insects to survive.
Anderson Cooper: So for 23 years you were always hungry? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
Of course.
We were always hungry.
And the guards always told us, "Through hunger you will repent.
" What Shin and his family were repenting for probably dates back to the Korean War, when two of his uncles reportedly defected to the South.
Shin believes that's why his father and grandfather were sent to Camp 14 and why he was supposed to live there until he died.
North Korea's first dictator Kim Il Sung instituted this practice of "three generations of punishment" back in the 1950s.
David Hawk: The idea is to eliminate this lineage-- to eliminate the family-- on the theory that if the grandfather was a counterrevolutionary, the father and the grandsons would be opposed to the regime, as well.
David Hawk is a human rights investigator who's interviewed dozens of former prisoners and guards from the six political prison camps operating in North Korea today.
David Hawk: The largest number of people in the prison camps are those who are the children or grandchildren of people considered to be wrongdoers or wrong thinkers.
Anderson Cooper: I've never heard of anything like that.
David Hawk: It's unique in the 20th or 21st century.
Mao didn't do it, Stalin didn't do it-- Hitler, of course, tried to exterminate entire families.
But in the post-World War II world, it's only Korea that had this practice.
North Korea denies it has any political prisons, but refuses to allow outside observers to inspect Camp 14 and other sites.
Anderson Cooper: There's no way to verify all the details of Shin's story.
Do you believe his story? David Hawk: Oh, sure.
His story is consistent with the testimony of other prisoners in every respect.
There's also physical evidence he carries around with him to this day.
The tip of his finger is missing.
He says it was chopped off as punishment when he accidentally broke a machine in a prison factory.
He also has serious scars on his back, stomach, and ankles, which he was willing to show us, but embarrassed to show on camera.
He says he received those wounds here, in an underground torture center.
He was tortured because his mother and older brother were accused of trying to escape.
He was just 13 years old at the time.
Anderson Cooper: Did they think that you were involved in the escape? Shin Dong-hyuk: I'm sure they did.
Anderson Cooper: How did they torture you? Shin Dong-hyuk: They hung me by the ankles.
And they tortured me with fire.
And from the scars that I have, the wounds on my body, I think they couldn't have done any more to me.
Shin says he tried to convince his interrogators he wasn't part of the escape plot.
He didn't know if they believed him until one day when they took him to that field used for executions.
Thousands of prisoners were already there waiting.
Shin Dong-hyuk: When I went to the public execution site I thought that I might be killed.
I was brought to the very front.
But that's where I saw my mother and my brother being dragged out and that's when I knew that it wasn't me.
Anderson Cooper: How did they kill your mother? Shin Dong-hyuk: They hung her and they shot my brother.
He speaks of it still without visible emotion, and admits he felt no sadness watching his mother and brother die.
He thought they got what they deserved.
They had, after all, broken the prison rules.
Blaine Harden: He believed the rules of the camp like gospel.
Blaine Harden is a veteran foreign correspondent who first reported Shin's story in The Washington Post and later wrote a book ["Escape from Camp 14," by Blaine Harden.]
about his life.
Anderson Cooper: He had no compass by which to judge his behavior.
Blaine Harden: He had a compass.
But the compass were the rules of the camp, the only compass he had.
And it was only when he was 23, when he met somebody from the outside, that that started to change.
Anderson Cooper: When he met Park.
Blaine Harden: When he met Park.
Park was a new prisoner Shin says he met while working in Camp 14's textile factory.
Unlike Shin, Park had seen the outside world.
He'd lived in Pyongyang and traveled in China, and he began to tell Shin what life was like on the other side of the fence.
Shin Dong-hyuk: I paid most attention to what kind of food he ate outside the camp.
Anderson Cooper: What kind of food he had eaten? Shin Dong-hyuk: A lot of different things.
Broiled chicken.
Barbecued pig.
The most important thing was the thought that even a prisoner like me could eat chicken and pork if I were able to escape the barbed wires.
Anderson Cooper: I've heard people define freedom in many ways.
I've never heard someone define it as broiled chicken.
Shin Dong-hyuk: I still think of freedom in that way.
Anderson Cooper: That's what freedom means to you? Shin Dong-hyuk: People can eat what they want.
It could be the greatest gift from God.
Anderson Cooper: You were ready to die-- just to get a good meal? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
He got his chance in January 2005, when he says he and Park were gathering firewood in this remote area near the electrified fence.
As the sun began to set, they decided to make a run for it.
Blaine Harden: And as they ran towards the fence, Shin slipped in the snow.
It was a snowy ridge, fell on his face.
Park got to the fence first and thrust his body between the first and second strands and pulled down that bottom wire and was immediately electrocuted.
Anderson Cooper: How did you get past him? Shin Dong-hyuk: I just crawled over his back.
Anderson Cooper: So you climbed-- you literally climbed over him? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yeah.
Yes.
He was a fugitive now in rural North Korea -- on the run in one of the poorest, most repressive countries in the world.
But that's not how it seemed to him.
Anderson Cooper: What did the outside world look like? Shin Dong-hyuk: It was like heaven.
People were laughing and talking as they wanted.
They were wearing what they wanted.
It was very shocking.
Anderson Cooper: How did you manage to get out of North Korea? Shin Dong-hyuk: I was just trying to get away from camp and I ended up going north.
And on the northern side people talked a lot about China.
Anderson Cooper: Did you know where China was? Shin Dong-hyuk: No.
Not at all.
It just happened that the way I was going was towards the border.
With amazing luck and cunning, Shin managed to steal and bribe his way across the border, and quietly work his way through China, where he would have been sent back if he was caught.
In Shanghai, he snuck into the South Korean consulate and was granted asylum.
In 2006 he arrived in South Korea with not a friend in the world.
He was so overwhelmed by culture shock and post-traumatic stress he had to be hospitalized.
More than seven years later, it's remarkable how far Shin's come.
He's 30 now, has made friends and built a new life for himself in Seoul, South Korea.
But old demons from Camp there was something he was hiding.
Two years ago, he finally confessed to author Blaine Harden.
Blaine Harden: When he first told me about the execution of his mother and brother, he didn't say that he had turned them in.
Anderson Cooper: You reported your mother and your brother? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
Anderson Cooper: What did you hope to get out of reporting your mother and your brother? Shin Dong-hyuk: Being full for the first time.
Anderson Cooper: More food? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
But the biggest reason was I was supposed to report it.
Anderson Cooper: Why was Shin tortured after ratting out his mother and brother? Blaine Harden: The guard who he ratted out to did not tell his superiors that he got the information from Shin.
Anderson Cooper: So the guard basically was trying to claim credit? Blaine Harden: Yes.
It was only after seeing what family life was like outside Camp 14 that Shin says he started to feel guilt about what he had done to his own mother and brother.
Shin Dong-hyuk: My mother and brother, if I could meet them through a time machine I would like to go back and apologize.
By telling this story I think that I can compensate, kind of repent for what I did.
Repentance has taken Shin all over the world.
He speaks at human rights rallies, meets with U.
S.
congressmen and is telling his story to us in part because he's frustrated by how much attention the press pays to North Korea's new leader Kim Jong Un and his wife and how little attention gets paid to the people in the camps.
In South Korea, he and some friends started an Internet talk show designed to tell the world what's really going on in the North.
As for that taste of freedom he risked his life for he can eat all the broiled chicken he wants now.
But admits it hasn't given him the satisfaction he'd hoped for.
Shin Dong-hyuk: When I eat something good, when I laugh with my friends or, you know, when I make some money, I'm excited.
But that's only momentary.
And right afterwards I start worrying again.
Anderson Cooper: You worry about what now? Shin Dong-hyuk: What I worry about now is all of those people in the prison camps.
Children are still being born there and somebody is probably being executed.
Anderson Cooper: Do you think about that a lot? Shin Dong-hyuk: Yes.
In 1903, the Wright brothers became the first men to fly.
Twenty-four years later, Charles Lindbergh became the first to fly over the Atlantic.
Coming soonanother possible breakthrough.
Two Swiss gentlemen have built a plane which they hope to fly across the United States next spring and then around the world without burning an ounce of fuel.
The plane is called Solar Impulse and it's powered entirely by the sun.
It is not the first solar airplane, but it is the first that can fly at night.
Thousands of solar cells on its wings transmit enough energy to batteries to keep it in the sky from sunset to sunrise.
Solar Impulse has already flown more than 2,500 miles from Switzerland to North Africa and back.
The goal: to make it around the world in 20 days and 20 nights.
["Solar Impulse you are cleared to proceed.
Have a good flight.
".]
It looks like it's flown straight out of Jules Verne.
It's so light it weighs less than an SUV and needs only 165 yards of runway to take off compared to over a mile for a commercial jet.
It has unnaturally long wings.
Rather than fly, the plane seems to glide, like a giant dragonfly.
The plane was created by Bertrand Piccard and his business partner, Andre Borschberg and if there ever was an odd couple, you're looking at them.
Andre is a pilot and an engineer but never worked on building an airplane.
Until six years ago, Bertrand didn't even know how to fly one.
He's a psychiatrist, an expert in hypnosis, and one of the most intense human beings we've ever met.
Bob Simon: We saw the plane take off and land last night.
Never seen anything like it.
Bertrand Piccard: An airplane like this doesn't exist anywhere else.
Bob Simon: And very recently, it existed nowhere but in your imagination.
Bertrand Piccard: Yeah, that's true.
If Piccard was the dreamer, he relied on his partner Borschberg to be the nuts and bolts guy.
Piccard knew he wanted to build something that could fly without using fossil fuels.
That was the goal.
But he couldn't explain -- and didn't even know -- what that something was going to be.
Andre Borschberg: Was this going to be an airplane? Was this going to be an air ship? Was this going to be a mixture of these solutions, so lighter than air, or something flying? Piccard and Borschberg were a good team.
One could think outside the box.
The other could fly there.
Piccard started dreaming about the plane in 1999.
They raised $120 million from corporate sponsors and investors.
A test pilot in 2009 flew the plane for the first time.
It managed to rise only three feet off the ground and stayed airborne for just 28 seconds.
They called it the "flea hop.
" But it was a high-tech flea, built with extremely light-weight material made from carbon fibers.
The wheels are smaller than the wheels on a kid's tricycle.
This state of the art plane sometimes looks like it had been put together by a 6-year-old with an erector set.
Bob Simon: What is this? Bertrand Piccard: This is the carbon fiber piece that makes the profile of the air foil on the leading edge of the airplane.
Bob Simon: And this weighsnothing? Bertrand Piccard: 91 grams.
Andre Borschberg: A fifth of a pound.
Bob Simon: Has there ever been anything so light before? Bertrand Piccard: No, I don't think so.
And the solar cells are light too.
Other cells available were more efficient but weighed more, and the Solar Impulse team needed cells flexible enough to create the contour of the wings.
There are 12,000 of them.
Andre Borschberg: These solar cells make the surface of the wing.
So they are not glued on the surface.
They are the surface.
Bertrand Piccard: And these cells capture the energy of the sun and transform it into electricity.
And then this electricity goes simultaneously to the engines and to the batteries and then we will reach the next sunrise and capture the sun again.
And we can continue theoretically forever.
Almost all of the energy created by the cells ends up being used by the engines.
Compared to car engines that can waste 70 percent of the energy provided.
During the day, excess energy is stored in batteries -- batteries that are unusually efficient.
Piccard says all the materials can be used for more practical applications.
Bertrand Piccard: If we can fly in a solar airplane like Solar Impulse with no fuel, just on solar power, then all the technologies here can, of course, also be used in the daily life for cars, for houses, for heating systems, cooling systems and so on.
While the technology was being fine tuned, Andre spent months inside a simulator so he could learn how to fly the plane himself.
Then short flights to and from a military air base in Switzerland.
The Alps provided a breathtaking backdrop, but they weren't in it for the scenery.
They wanted altitude and distance.
They took it out of Switzerland to Belgium and Paris, where they created quite a stir flying by the Eiffel Tower.
But for once the French didn't complain.
Solar Impulse was so quiet and elegant.
But the biggest challenge was flying at night.
Were they ready? "Yes," said Piccard and he announced to the team that Andre would be in the cockpit.
[Bertrand Piccard: Andre will stay up there now as long as we can.
.]
And off he went, into the night.
For eight hours, Andre flew in darkness over Switzerland.
Andre could see nothing so the team on the ground had to track winds, squalls, battery levels.
Watching this creature in the air -- long after the sun has surrendered - is almost unreal.
The plane emerges from the darkness like an apparition.
Just before the sun peeked through the clouds, Bertrand counted Andre down to the dawn.
[Bertrand Piccard: Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
We made it! We made it guys! Andre you should be with us right now.
.]
Andre made it with power to spare and, just think, he could have taken off again without refueling.
Bob Simon: It must be a pretty good sensation when that sun comes up in the morning.
Andre Borschberg: It is, well certainly because of the beauty, I mean the sunset is gorgeous but the sunrise of course brings us the next day there.
It brings the hope again that you can continue.
Bertrand is continuing a family tradition --- visionaries, pioneers, adventurers.
His father, Jacques, designed a new fangled submarine, squeezed himself inside, and went down seven miles beneath the surface of the Pacific and came up to talk about it.
That was 50 years ago.
His grandfather, Auguste, decided to go the other way - up.
He'd heard the Earth was round, but wanted to see for himself.
So, he designed a pressurized cabin, attached it to a balloon and flew it to an altitude of 10 miles.
Bertrand Piccard: It was considered by NASA as the first man in space.
So in those days it was like going in another world.
Bob Simon: Was your grandfather in fact the first human being to see the curvature of the earth? Bertrand Piccard: Yes.
And that was really impressive for me as a kid because I was reading in the history books all the stories about the Earth being flat, being round or whatever.
And my grandfather came back and said, "I saw the curvature of the Earth with my eyes.
" So once you live this as a kid, of course, you want to continue into that field of exploration.
And he did.
In 1992, Bertrand entered and won the first ever trans-Atlantic balloon race.
Seven years later, he entered a much more demanding race, flying around the world in a balloon nonstop in three weeks.
Bertrand landed in the Egyptian desert just in time.
He was almost out of fuel, had almost fallen from the sky like Icarus.
His balloon capsule is now on display at the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington -- right there with the Wright Brothers plane, Lindbergh's plane, the Spirit of Saint Louis and the Apollo will eventually have a home here as well and he told us the inspiration for the airplane started with that balloon landing in the desert.
Bertrand Piccard: When I landed there, there were 40 kilos, 80 pounds of liquid propane out of the 3.
7 tons from the takeoff.
It was almost a failure due to the dependency on fuel and on that day I made a promise.
I made a promise that the next time I would fly around the world it would be with no fuel at all.
Earlier this year, they made their longest flights yet, from Switzerland to Spain and then across the Mediterranean to Morocco and back.
For the flight round the world they will be in the air 20 days and 20 nights with several stops so the pilots can take turns.
Bob Simon: Flying over the Swiss Alps is pleasant enough but think about it, I can't move, I can't stand up and, if you want to think about a really pleasant thought, the toilet is built into the seat so you've got to figure out how to do that one way or another.
Andre has already done this for 72 hours, but when the time comes for the big flight it'll take five days and five nights over the Pacific.
Nothing like that has ever been done in a plane before.
And there is nothing they can do now to make it less dangerous.
The plane is so light, a bad storm could dump it into the Pacific.
It likes the sun but isn't fond of clouds.
The cockpit is an oven by day and an ice box by night.
And the plane itself can be temperamental.
It flies well at 30 miles an hour, but can stall if the speed drops to 23.
And it can tip over when it lands, unless crew members on the tarmac run and grab onto the metal struts attached to the wings.
None of this seems to bother Bertrand Piccard, not with his genes and his laser-like focus.
Bertrand Piccard: Everything you do, you have to do it because you're well prepared and you're absolutely calm inside of yourself.
Bob Simon: You're also a psychiatrist.
Bertrand Piccard: Yes.
Bob Simon: Any mental devices, any tricks? Bertrand Piccard: Yeah, I use a lot of self-hypnosis.
Bob Simon: You can hypnotize yourself? Bertrand Piccard: Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Bob Simon: Like that? Bertrand Piccard: Little bit longer.
Twice instead of once.
Bob Simon: No, but I mean, you could-- at any time, if you're in the plane-- Bertrand Piccard: Yes.
Bob Simon: And you feel - I need to hypnotize myself now, you can do it? Bertrand Piccard: Yes, yes, absolutely.
Bertrand and Andre hope to fly from California to Virginia next year.
They are planning to fly around the world in 2015.
Bertrand knows it's unlikely a solar plane will fly commercially in his lifetime, but feels he has done something more than invent something new.
He has combined technology with poetry and proven what our ancestors knew thousands of years ago -- that the ultimate power is the sun.