'Mama Might Be Better Off Dead.' The human face of health care

When we set out to review 'Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America" (Chicago University Press, 1993), former Chicago journalist Laurie Kaye Abraham's chronicle of one poor, urban family's battle to obtain health care, we discovered two things. First, the author had done a better job in her Introduction of briefly conveying what this rather singular book is all about than we might expect from a traditional review. Second, even in that short synopsis, Laurie Kaye Abraham had succeeded, in graphic terms that statistical and rhetorical abstractions cannot match, in showing why providing health insurance for the poor is not the same as providing health care and why any health reform plan that continues to ignore the needs of the poor will be doomed to failure. For these reasons, and with the publisher's permission, we are reproducing that Introduction here in full.