Laurie Kaye Abraham argues in Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in the United States that the health care system in the United States has indeed failed miserably, specifically in treating poor people. As Abraham portrays it, the system has not only failed, it seems to have been created to fail, and to cause as much misery for poor and helpless sick people as it possibly can. Despite this negative portrait, the author apparently believes that the system can be restructured to better serve the poor sick in this country, although it seems that a complete collapse of the system first is more likely.
However, the author is not merely trying to show the sad state of the system overall, in national, statistical, theoretical, or other grand contexts. To the contrary, she wants to bring the reader down to the level where the failure of the health care system is most intensely and tragically experienced--in the lives of the poor sick themselves: "At the book's center are four generations of a black family who live in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods." Members of the family are riddled with various, serious ailments. Jackie, granddaughter, mother and wife of ailing kin, is shown to be not "a helpless victim but a resourceful woman who tried to work the health care nonsystem to the best of her ability" (2). Her failures, Abraham writes, are due to the system and not to any lack of effort on her part. Jackie is a shining symbol against the argument that the poor are lazy or unresourceful or do not care about their own lives or health. Despite extensive reliance on professional and other journals and books, the heart of her argument clearly resides in the lives of the real living people she writes about.
The reader cannot but be deeply saddened and enraged by the indignities, injustices, and outright cruelties this family faces, as representatives of all poor people seeking health care in the United States. Were...