The mayoral race is on, and we can expect everything that Mayor Bloomberg says to be pounced on and criticized by his rivals. The battle started promptly before the first day of the new year with the mayor’s statement that poor people get better medical care than the wealthy.

At an interfaith prayer breakfast held at the New York Public Library, Mr. Bloomberg was quoted as saying: “This city has 11 public hospitals, and every rating agency says these are the best hospitals, better than the great teaching hospitals we have in this city. Medical care in this city is arguably one of the few services you can point to anyplace in the world where the poor get better services than the wealthy. It really is true. If you get sick you go to a public hospital. Every single number shows we’ve done a spectacular job.”

Naturally, his rivals were quick to accuse the billionaire of not being able to relate. Rep. Anthony Weiner asked, “Can this guy be any more out of touch?” Fernando Ferrer, who ranked ahead of Bloomberg in a recent poll, chimed in with his opinion on the mayor’s comment: “It’s unfortunate. At a time when one in four working New Yorkers has no health insurance and middle-class families are struggling with skyrocketing health-care costs, the person responsible for addressing the problem doesn’t even see that there is one.”

It may be true that Mr. Bloomberg cannot relate to what the poor of the city experience when it comes to health care, but neither can any of his prospective opponents. The former borough president, Mr. Ferrer, may have been born and raised in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, but he could hardly be classified now as struggling. I also have difficulty imagining congressman Weiner in the waiting room of Metropolitan Hospital. Mr. Bloomberg is basing his opinion on statistics and records, which do show that in an accreditation survey municipal hospitals performed better than some private institutions.

From my own perspective, I might agree with the mayor if he means that city hospitals are equipped with high quality personnel and equipment. That does not mean patient care is as good as that available in private hospitals, but the poor do get adequate medical care. They just have to wait in line a lot longer. I ought to know.

My first child was born in Lenox Hill Hospital. I had a Park Avenue obstetrician and excellent care. That’s because I had a great insurance policy from my employer, Air Canada. My next two children were born in Bellevue Hospital. My husband had only limited hospital insurance, and I received my prenatal care through the hospital clinic, which billed me on a sliding scale per visit. It was not the most desirable arrangement, but I daresay it was far superior to what I might have endured at a free clinic under a socialist government.

Staten Island has no public hospitals, but Bayley Seton, which has since closed, filled the medical needs of the borough’s less wealthy. Like Bellevue, it provided excellent care, and all my six children went to the pediatric clinic there. While we paid for visits on a sliding scale, most of the other patients were on Medicaid – yet we could not have had better care. Joan Short, named in New York magazine as one of the nation’s top pediatricians, was on staff there until very recently. I cannot imagine my children getting better care in any private hospital. Dr. Short’s private practice is swamped with eager parents hoping for an opening in her roster of patients.

We do have very good private hospitals here, but deadly mistakes can be made with the wealthy patients, and perhaps the mayor took that into consideration when making his statement.

I will not name the hospital, but my brother-in-law’s sister was a robust, healthy mother of five when she went into a very highly regarded hospital to have a calcium deposit removed from her heel. She received an overdose of anesthesia and ended up brain-dead. I will never forget visiting her in this beautiful medical facility and staring at her vacant eyes and twisted features. She lasted one year, her body wasting away to half its normal size.

Perhaps the mayor was also thinking of Andy Warhol’s demise, about which a state investigation concluded: “the active medical staff of the hospital did not assure the maintenance of the proper quality of all medication and treatment provided to patient.”

Warhol was wealthy and famous but died as a result of substandard care in a private hospital. He would have been better off in Bellevue.