Pundits once touted retail clinics—those services you might find in Walgreens or CVS stores across the United States—as the alternative to insurance policies with steep premiums and high co-pays. They seemed ideally suited for those urban areas with underserved populations: a market correction of the income skew in medical services.

Not so, says a study published in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine: Retail clinics, just like any other service, cluster in better-off neighborhoods. These areas had fewer blacks, lower poverty rates, and higher median incomes. They were also more likely to already be well-served medically, without counting the retail clinics.

The authors are quick to note that this doesn’t mean people in the “less advantaged” areas aren’t getting the services they need—they just need to drive farther to get it. And people are certainly willing to go to great lengths for good health care. According to a report by UCLA researchers, nearly 1 million Mexican immigrants and U.S.-born citizens are crossing the southern border to get what they perceive as better, more affordable medical services.

The sheer volume of migrating patients struck Steven P. Wallace, the study’s author. “I was surprised at how common it was,” Wallace says. “My mother-in-law goes down to buy prescriptions, but if you had told me a million people a year go to Mexico… I would have thought it was a tenth of that.”

The second standout for Wallace was the distance people would travel to access care—half of those seeking international assistance lived more than 120 miles away from the border. “To get there from Sacramento or Oakland, you’re not going to do that when you have the flu,” he says. “My guess would be that people go back to visit family around Christmas, and get their diabetes or teeth taken care of.”

So much for the hysteria about immigrants flooding our hospitals.

If that commitment to quality surprises you, a study by the Center for Healthcare Decisions found that Californians are willing to make health care a top priority. Which isn’t a huge leap. When people are crossing the U.S. border back into Mexico to find quality care, there’s clearly a problem with the system at home.