Alabama Insurance

The old man swore he saw the angel.

It was a year or so, the days of 79 years of Emile Lyon suffered a celiac aneurysm. “The day of my inner pages busted,” he said. Commercial fishermen bone had lived by hurricanes, heart bypasses and 50 Anniversary. But so far, he really felt the Lord called her at home.

When two paramedics in charge of the ambulance: “I saw the light and angels and everything,” he said. The haze of pain, he found a familiar face, his doctor, Regina Benjamin. It was the jump in the ambulance with him and treated him in spirals of 30 minutes by car nearest emergency Mobile.

“Sauvé my life,” said Lyons. “Could it an angel, too.”

It seems that everyone in this poor fishing village on Alabama’s Gulf Coast has a story to tell about this woman, his etchings Hai bites, watches over babies and just executed, if accidents in the shipyards and docks injure husbands and son. She makes home visits in a Ford pick-up and controls on break-ins by telephone.

If it can not pay - which is often - she says to them to pay if they can, which seems little they can. With envelopes mere $ 5 bills, they come from his office: whites, blacks, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotians man, far from doctors, proof of insurance recovery.

At a time when the nation’s health is dominated by large insurance companies, for massive profit hospital companies and organizations of health care, Dr. Benjamin, 38, is a throwback long thought to be extinct: a country doctor heart. It uses a single bag of Alabama, is desperate for doctors, where only humans, drag a living golf - and a little lost travelers - ever.

“We do not have someone in front of him,” said Bill Menton, a retired state senator, he can afford to travel, to see, but everybody gets the doctor Dr. Benjamin. “We Only been a lot of shrimp pickers, that nobody cares. ”

It is the only doctor here, and about 80 percent of their patients live below the poverty line. As they can pay less would never cover the costs of their staff, two nurses and an office manager or overloading the bare-bones clinic, as part of a sidewalk Pool Hall.

But they found a way to the clinic, and said medical experts and patients, the people of Bayou La Batre to thank Dr. Benjamin’s business savvy more curative their hands.

She opened her own firm in 1990, given the nature and way to move the night in travel as a doctor urgently. But she quickly realized that needed to know how economics and management of the bureaucracy, as it was about anatomy, so that 250 miles roundtrip to New Orleans shuttle twice a week to earn While In his MBA from the school, Dr. Benjamin discovered a little-known destination in 1977 a health clinic federal law to report quality-available to help pay for operating a clinic or in places such as offices Bayou La Batre (pronounced BAT-lah Tree), where emergency medical assistance was needed.

Now, after several state and national Medical Association, she receives calls, letters and visits others want to know how to do the same in towns and backwoods towns across the country. She speaks at seminars. But most importantly, it treats the sick, a small town. She had offers, big-city doctors and hospitals, but she refused.

Dr. Benjamin said she chooses to work in Bayou La Batre, because it is necessary, because it is a place where the presence of a doctor can make a difference.

“She wants to help people, the more it wants, for an amount of money,” said Dale Hammac, 27, weighs its 10 month old baby was known to sleep with an ear infection.

Like others in this town of 2500, Mr. Hammac fight, if you speak badly of his doctor.

Dr. Benjamin is a soft-spoken woman quickly to smile, slow to brag, too good to be true seems. Instead of talking about success, she speaks failures.