We begin in Brownsville, Brooklyn at the Brownsville Multiservice Family Health Center.

Graciella Flats, she goes by Grace, is a nurse and the clinics director of nursing.

She was born in Panama, moved to New York about 20 years ago.

During the hours I said to everybody, I'm born to be a nurse.

I love nursing and I love my patient.

No matter how much you love your job, Brownsville is not necessarily the first neighborhood

where most people would choose to work.

It's got a lot of crime, a lot of unemployment, and not much money.

You're always surprised to see the income that some people make here.

Approximately between 60-65% of our patients, they are under the poverty level.

The median household income in Brownsville is barely $27,000.

About three quarters of the residents are African-American.

Grace Flats is also of African descent.

She says that roughly 90% of the patients in her health clinic are there for chronic diseases.

The core of our services are hyper-transiv diabetes and obesity.

Hyper-tension, diabetes and obesity heart disease too.

On the face of it, there's nothing noteworthy about this predominance of chronic diseases.

According to the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 86% of US health care

spending goes to treat chronic diseases.

But what is noteworthy is that these conditions are much more concentrated among certain groups

of people.

We're talking about a two-fold gap, at least a two-fold gap, of the major killers, which

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