Kira Carrillo Corser © 1993

This is crazy. Emergency departments are overcrowded because they're being used as primary care centers. We can't continue that concept.

This is the great lie in the United States: People who don't have health insurance will just go to the public hospital and get care. If they really need it, they'll be able to get care, right? They're competing for services with someone with a heart attack, who's even more desperately ill.

We delude ourselves into believing that medical care is available to everyone. Yes, people are dying because they can't get medical care. That's the truth. Don't sugar coat it. If we told the truth, then we could do something about it.

Dr. David Baker, internist and specialist in public health and health access
Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles

The Great Lie




The great lie hung itself like sheets
across the highway of faces speeding
to avoid it. It was a mess, a tangle of bodies
colliding with what was calling itself The Lie.

It had a great PR committee. For weeks, the news
announced that people who don't have health
insurance can just go to the emergency room
in the public hospital and get care. And it

did such a sell job, that few suspected the pit
millions of people were falling into, city after
city, town after town, waiting hours, too sick
to wait any more, going home without

care, the fevered and fallen, the broken
and bad breathing, waiting for a pill, an X ray,
an antibiotic, small loving things

but no matter. The Lie was tired, its job
description obsolete. It was time



- Frances Payne Adler © 1993