Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses systemic racism and poverty, patient neglect and abuse, and drug use.

Laurie Kaye Abraham is a journalist and the author of Mama Might Be Better Off Dead. Abraham received a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in law from Yale University before moving on to the work in journalism that would eventually lead to writing this book. Abraham states that the purpose of the articles out of which the book grew was to “bring ‘people’ into the investigative publication’s health care reporting” (xv)—essentially, to humanize healthcare issues that were frequently reduced to statistics and large-scale politics. Once she began working with the Banes family, it became clear that only a few articles would not be adequate to cover the scope of their healthcare difficulties.

Within the world of the text itself, Abraham takes on the classic role of a journalist, trying to make herself invisible to let the story of the Banes family shine. However, this invisibility is not always possible. There is, firstly, the issue of her perspective as a white, educated reporter observing a low-income Black family. There are fleeting moments when Abraham acknowledges it herself, such as the observation that Jackie “sometimes used me as her intermediary with doctors, figuring that my color and education would give me an edge” (202).