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Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America
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Product Description
The story takes place in North Lawndale, a neighborhood that lies in the shadows of Chicago's Loop. Although surrounded by some of the city's finest medical facilities, North Lawndale is one of the sickest, most medically underserved communities in the country. Headed by Jackie Banes, who oversees the care of a diabetic grandmother, a husband on kidney dialysis, an ailing father, and three children, the Banes family contends with countless medical crises. From visits to emergency rooms and dialysis units, to trials with home care, to struggles for Medicaid eligibility, Abraham chronicles their access (or lack of access) to medical care.
Told sympathetically but without sentimentality, their story reveals an inadequate health care system that is further undermined by the direct and indirect effects of poverty. When people are poor, they become sick easily. When people are sick, their families quickly become poorer.
Embedded in the family narrative is a lucid analysis of the gaps, inconsistencies, and inequalities the poor face when they seek health care. This book reveals what health care policies crafted in Washington, D. C. or state capitals look like when they hit the street. It shows how Medicaid and Medicare work and don't work, the Catch-22s of hospital financing in the inner city, the racial politics of organ transplants, the failure of childhood immunization programs, the vexed issues of individual responsibility and institutional paternalism. One observer puts it this way: "Show me the poor woman who finds a way to get everything she's entitled to in the system, and I'll show you a woman who could run General Motors."
Abraham deftly weaves these themes together to make a persuasive case for health care reform while unflinchingly presenting the complexities that will make true reform as difficult as it is necessary. Mama Might Be Better Off Dead is a book with the power to change the way health care is understood in America. For those seeking to learn what our current system of health care promises and what it delivers, it offers a place for the debate to begin.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #130262 in Books
- Published on: 1994-11-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 297 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The vicious circle of poverty and illness is powerfully portrayed in Abraham's ( Reinventing Home ) account of an uninsured, black, four-generational family in one of Chicago's "poorest and sickest" neighborhoods. Included in their medical misfortunes: the amputation of both legs of a diabetic grandmother; a drug-addicted husband on kidney dialysis who undergoes a kidney transplant; a partially stroke-paralyzed son; and children who lack primary care and immunization. This personally observed, lucid chronicle and call for reform of our ailing health system covers all levels of responsibility in the medical establishment, and deserves scrutiny by our administration's health service planners. Abraham concludes that a reformed health care system should set limits on health spending while stressing "caring" over "curing."
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This is a refreshing chronicle of the inadequate patchwork of federally funded health programs caring for our nation's urban poor. Journalist Abraham uses the medically plagued Banes family as a springboard for his analyses of the convoluted, mysterious, and at times nonsensical healthcare system that holds the urban poor captive. Unlike Alex Kotlowitz, whose There Are No Children Here ( LJ 4/1/91) elucidates the glaring inequities in our social system through the powerful story of two boys, Abraham uses the Banes's ill health as a pulpit for reciting numerous studies, quoting scholars, and commenting on current policy debates. Abraham does an excellent job of explaining the maze of healthcare programs available to the urban poor. More importantly, he clearly identifies in human and policy terms how these same programs have failed a population desperately in need of help. Recommended for most collections.
- Karen A. Wolin, Univ. of Illinois Coll. of Medicine at Chicago
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Cool yet compassionate eyewitness report of an inner-city black family's struggle to cope with sickness and poverty. Abraham, expanding on articles she wrote for The Chicago Reporter, demonstrates brilliantly just how confusing and cumbersome our national health-care system has become. From May 1989 to April 1990, Abraham followed the (pseudonymous) Banes family as its head, Jackie, cared for her bedridden diabetic grandmother; her alcoholic, partially paralyzed father; her drug-abusing husband, on thrice-weekly dialysis following kidney failure; and three young children. The labyrinthine mysteries of Medicare and Medicaid are daunting even to the Yale-educated author, yet Jackie must make what sense of them she can in order to keep her family going. Still, services that might have protected the children's health or lightened the family's burdens often aren't taken advantage of thanks to confusion about how the system works, lack of information, and the overwhelming job of simply surviving from one day to the next. Abraham concentrates on two stories--that of Jackie's grandmother, whose condition worsens, requiring hospitalization, then nursing-home care; and that of Jackie's husband, who receives a second kidney transplant. Both stories raise the issue of rationing: Could the $120,000 spent on the final months of the grandmother's life have been better utilized? How should recipients be selected for scarce organs? Abraham's depiction of the Baneses' plight reveals serious flaws in our health-care system, but the more basic problem is seen to be the devastating social illness of our inner cities, an illness no national health plan can cure. Abraham doesn't pretend to have the answers--but she illuminates the problems with passion and skill. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Customer Reviews
If your poor and sick, you may as weel be deead
I was required to read this book for a Social Problems Analysis class. Before, I had never thought about the major problems with our health system. Unlike a reviwer before me, I don't see her as being biased. If you have ever lived in a poor urban neighborhood, then you would know, Abraham is correct. People who live in poverty, often have no access to better health care, so they take what they can get. It is easy to say these people should take responsible for their health care if you have never been in this situation. Abraham did a wonderful job staying objective, even at times, when I don't know if I could have. I would reccomend this book to anyone who has questions about how the medical system works in poor areas.
Puleese!!!!!!
This left wing, socalist bent author wants to shame the government for not providing cradle to grave management of people's lives; maybe if the author focused on this nation's irresponsible people, who go through life thinking you can abuse your body then get Washington to pay your medical and nursing home bills..... sick book, sick thinking,
Great book
If you're interested in health care in America, Medicare, Medicaid, Chicago, poverty, and health care disparities read this book. Great investigative journalism style.
