The Great White Lie.

• Author: Crewdson, John

I am writing this in Los Angeles, where I arrived yesterday from New York. I am happy to be here, not only because the mid-January temperature is 40 degrees warmer, but (and this is the truth) because Los Angeles is a better place than New York to get sick.

Don't misunderstand. Not only am I not sick, but according to my doctor I am healthier than I deserve to be. Still, I am middle-aged and overweight and lately I have been wondering, as I travel here and there, about what to do if I get run over by a taxi or fall off a hotel balcony or choke on a chicken bone--or if, God forbid, the Big One hits. As I have suspected, and as Walt Bogdanich (*) now confirms, there are some really bad placed in America to get sick. New York is probably the worst. A couple of years ago, as I began to get in touch with my mortality, I asked my friend, a New York doctor, which of that city's many distinguished hospitals I should choose in the event of cardiac arrest. "None of them," she said. "Don't get sick in New York."

She wasn't kidding. Since then, while reporting on AIDS, I have visited a number of New York hospitals in which I would never, under any circumstances, want to be a patient. High on the list is Bellevue, where you'll probably end up if you become cyanotic while choking on a chicken bone, and where you'll discover that the chicken-bone chokers have to get in line behind the hit-and-runs and the heart attacks and the gunshot wounds. There are plenty of New York City hospitals worse than Bellevue, but not many that are better. People who have enough money to buy their own hospitals (the late Shah of Iran comes to mind) seem to like New York Hospital, the teaching adjunct of Cornell Medical School. But as Bogdanich points out, New York Hospital is also where Andy Warhol died, not because of some rare affliction or inoperable complication, but because he was left unattended following a routine operation on his gallbladder (and he had a private nurse).

Here in Los Angeles my chances are better. In Beverly Hills there's the redoubtable Cedars Sinai ("We have plenty of room. Just come on over," said the calm, cheerful emergency-room nursing supervisor when I telephoned the other night to ask how things were going), with the UCLA Med Center a close second. The Los Angeles suburbs also have some first-class hospitals: St. John's in Santa Monica, Pasadena's Huntington, and Valley Presbyterian in the San Fernando Valley. After that the list gets short, and it's even shorter in San Francisco, which hasn't had a truly great hospital since French Hospital closed down. In fact, I'd try to make it to Stanford before I'd check into S.F. General, where employees frequently don't answer the telephone and often seem confused about whether a particular doctor is on the staff. Washington, D.C., where I live, has a couple of well-known hospitals that are OK (and a couple of well-known ones that are less OK), but unless I was bleeding to death I'd head for Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, consistently rated as top in the nation. Anyone wishing to know where not to go may drop me a stamped, self-addressed envelope in care of this magazine. Or buy Bogdanich's book.

The good hospital-bad hospital gamel can be lots of fun--doctors play it all the time--but as the doctors themselves are the first to admit, it's ultimately misleading. The truth is, even at the newest and best-equipped hospitals staffed by the best-trained and most conscientious staff, fatal mistakes are made with some regularity. The best hospital in the world is probably the Cambridge University Hospital in England, where patients are frequently transported from...