· Web viewCox, who works for HealthConnect, visits with Carolyn Brewster, 29, Melvin McGee, 29, and their baby, Justin, who was born prematurely, most likely because Brewster had

Copied from: The New York Times Magazine 7/27/2012Article: Hope in the Wreckage. / What Can Mississippi Learn From Iran.

In her cover story for the magazine, Suzy Hansen writes about a plan to save Mississippi’s broken health care system. Lynsey Addario went to the delta to photograph some of the people suffering from health problems.

Here, Claudia Cox, a registered nurse in Jackson, Miss., visits with Mamie Marshall, who is dying of bone cancer, at her home in Jackson.

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Mississippi has some of the worst health statistics in the country, and many delta hospitals complain that their emergency rooms are overrun with nonpaying patients. Of the state’s population of nearly three million, 550,000 are uninsured. There are 176 doctors per 100,000 people, the lowest such number in the country.

Here, downtown Jackson.


Dr. Aaron Shirley, shown here, says he believes that the problems of the American poor — living conditions, deficient education, harmful behaviors and the lack of family support and access to healthful lifestyles — demand house calls.

Three years ago, Shirley, who is a civil rights-era hero, found inspiration for health care reform in an unlikely place: the primary health care system created in the 1980s in the Islamic Republic of Iran.


Shirley and his colleagues admire Iran’s preventive health care system, which dispatches community health workers to homes. That’s the mission of HealthConnect, which Shirley founded in 2010.

Cox, who works for HealthConnect, visits with Carolyn Brewster, 29, Melvin McGee, 29, and their baby, Justin, who was born prematurely, most likely because Brewster had high blood pressure and pre-eclampsia, at their home in Jackson, Miss








HealthConnect exists to reduce admissions to the Central Mississippi Medical Center, a Jackson hospital where people routinely use the emergency room for primary care, sometimes multiple times in a month.

Here, Cox with Brewster and McGee.




Tia Sturdevant, 15, watches TV at her home in in Metcalfe, Miss.

Idenia Sturdevant, 32, Tia’s mother, suffers from diabetes, kidney failure and high blood pressure. She says that she has difficulty walking as a result of her illnesses.

Shirley has teamed up with Dr. Mohammad Shahbazi, center, a professor at Jackson State University, on HealthConnect, a holistic, health care agency in Mississippi.

Shabazi grew up as a member of a small nomadic tribe in Iran. After moving here for graduate school in the 1980s, he became fascinated with what he saw as similarities between the conditions in Mississippi and the conditions back home.




Morning in Jackson, Miss., not far from the now-empty shopping district downtown, where Medgar Evers led the civil rights boycott in the early 1960s.

Joshua Alexander, 25, who is H.I.V.-positive, at his home in Greenville, in the delta.

Human Rights Watch calls the Deep South “the epicenter of the H.I.V. epidemic in the United States, with more people living and dying of AIDS than in any region in the country.”

Blacks in Mississippi are dying from AIDS at a rate 64 percent higher than the nation’s average. The state Department of Health estimates that half of H.I.V.-positive Mississippians currently don’t receive treatment




In the United States, the mortality rate of black infants is more than twice that of white infants; Mississippi, which is 37 percent black, has huge neonatal intensive care units.

Here, Terry Coates touches her 4-day-old grandchild, Tayden Coates, in the incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit at the University Mississippi Medical Center

Christopher Jackson, 11, at home with his family in Holmes County, which has been described as the fattest county in America. Christopher, like his father, Amos, has diabetes.

Sixty-nine percent of adult Mississippians are obese or overweight, and a quarter of the state’s households don’t have access to decent, healthful food

Maranda Corley, 19, with her children in their bedroom in Ellisville, Miss. Corley, who got pregnant for the first time when she was 16, had twins that were born prematurely and with serious disabilities. Four months ago, she had a third child.

Corley lives with her husband, her mother, her maternal grandparents, her brother and her aunt and her aunt’s three children.

Mississippi has the highest rate of teen births in the nation. Until this year, schools taught abstinence.




Racquel Williams, 16, was in 10th grade when she got pregnant. She dropped out of school as soon as she found out.

Lavatrice Jordan, 35, with one of her twins, LaGlorian Jordan, who was born at 26 weeks and just over one pound. Jordan had high blood pressure leading up to and during her pregnancy.

Vonda Wells, 41, right, at home with her daughter, Brandyce Wells, 19, and Brandyce’s daughter, Imari, in Clinton, Miss.

Wells suffers from asthma, high blood pressure and congestive heart failure, and




Vonda Wells, 41, right, at home with her daughter, Brandyce Wells, 19, and Brandyce’s daughter, Imari, in Clinton, Miss.

Wells suffers from asthma, high blood pressure and congestive heart failure, and

Cox visits with Regina Huggins, center, who had been in the hospital 20 times in eight months since her heart attack.

She was a smoker with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who lacked energy and had lost 50 pounds. She had $300,000 in medical bills.

The Iranian model goes a step further than traditional community health centers by making the health house workers responsible for their villagers’ well-being from birth.




A shuttered factory in Jackson. When several Iranian doctors and administrators and their wives visited Mississippi as part of the early stages HealthConnect’s creation, they were surprised by what they saw: “This is America?” they asked.





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· Web viewCox, who works for HealthConnect, visits with Carolyn Brewster, 29, Melvin McGee, 29, and their baby, Justin, who was born prematurely, most likely because Brewster had