The Great White Lie: How America's Hospitals Betray Our Trust and Endanger Our Lives

Starting with the 1989 rape and grisly muder of a young, pregnant Bellevue Hospital doctor, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal Bogdanich dramatizes the crime and appalling conditions in our hospitals during the 1980s. Reporting that scandal-ridden managements systematically concealed incidents of professional malpractice and accidents in unavailable or falsified records and mortality-rate reports, the author also charges corrupt physicians with favoring profit-making procedures for an increasingly sick, poor, aging and uninsured population. While praising the legions of dedicated and overworked hospital staff members across the country, Bogdanich decries bloated, diagnostic-based Medicare rates and the lack of a comprehensive national health care policy. He asserts that the federal Medicare program ``could reform hospitals virtually overnight'' if it would emulate local corporate groups that supervise quality of care and efficiency of client hospitals. (Nov.)