Today, when a baby is born in Flint, the challenges of daily life look much different than they did just a few years ago.
Through a first-of-its-kind program called Rx Kids, families now receive direct cash support during pregnancy and a child’s first year — an approach designed to reduce infant poverty and improve long-term health outcomes. The program is the vision of Michigan State University physician Mona Hanna, who believes preventing poverty may be one of the most powerful forms of medicine.
And prevention is something she thinks about every day.
“I’m giving vaccines to prevent illness. I’m talking about safety and injury prevention and car seats and sleeping on the back and healthy nutrition. Everything I do, one patient at a time, is prevention,” says Hanna. “All these things are about preserving the potential and promise of our children.”
Hanna is associate dean for Public Health and C.S. Mott Endowed Professor of Public Health at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine and founding director of the Pediatric Public Health Initiative, a partnership between MSU and Hurley Children’s Hospital.
Over the years, she has built a reputation as a trailblazing scientist and champion of health equity — the belief that every person deserves a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible.
In 2015, Hanna helped expose the lead contamination in Flint’s drinking water after her research found elevated blood lead levels in the city’s children. She not only uncovered the crisis but became instrumental in the community’s ongoing recovery.
Today, she leads Rx Kids, the program that’s reimagining how society can eliminate infant poverty and reduce health disparities related to income, geography, economic opportunity, housing and access to care. This critical cash assistance helps families afford essentials like baby supplies, food, housing and utilities and transportation — ensuring families have the flexibility to respond to their unique and most urgent needs. This cash prescription invests in families’ financial stability during pregnancy and a baby’s early life, a critical time for development that’s also often the most economically challenging. And data shows that this support, early on, leads to immediate and lifelong health impacts, including improvements in birth outcomes, maternal well-being and health in early infancy.
“That’s part of being at MSU. It’s part of being in academia. We’re supposed to solve big problems and imagine a better world.” - Mona Hanna
Launched as a national first in Flint, Rx Kids will soon expand to more Michigan communities, reaching almost 25,000 babies annually across the state. And the program is under consideration to expand to other states like Washington, Oregon, Ohio and New Mexico, where legislation has been introduced to make it possible.
Now named to the TIME100 Most Influential People in Health of 2026 for her visionary leadership in founding Rx Kids — her second TIME recognition and just one of the Spartan’s many accolades over the years — Hanna reflects on the path that shaped her. From becoming a teenage environmental activist and pursuing her medical education at MSU to finding mentors in the incredible women in her life and improving the health of her community through a commitment to dignity, Hanna continues to move through her life and work with a purpose-driven focus on positive change.
Changing the world from high school onward
Hanna was 14 when she joined her high school environmental club, which had decided to take on a real-world fight: opposing the reopening of an incinerator near an elementary school in Madison Heights.
“I was door-knocking, protesting and I realized at this early age that what happens in your environment impacts your health,” she says.
The club succeeded, ultimately helping elect a state representative who supported passing a bipartisan law prohibiting incinerators near schools.
“That made a click in my head,” Hanna recalls. “I understood that government can do big things, that government can right historical wrongs and that policymakers can truly serve their constituents.”
With a firm belief in the role of policy and government to make the world a better place, Hanna decided to study environmental science, combining courses like forestry, ecology and geology with public health research — “kind of creating my own major in environmental health.”
At the end of her undergraduate program at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, Hanna realized that medicine would allow her to help in the most personal way. She applied to the Peace Corps and the MSU College of Human Medicine. “Wherever I got in first was where I was going to go,” she smiles. “And I got into MSU.”
It felt like “an alignment of stars,” says Hanna. MSU is the nation’s first community-based medical school with a mission of serving communities through primary care. It was the perfect match for Hanna’s commitment to population health and underserved communities.
Joining a lineage of women reformers
Much of today’s movement to make health care accessible to all has its roots in the ideals of environmental justice and policy reform that were first championed by groundbreaking women like Jane Addams and Alice Hamilton, who led efforts to reduce lead poisoning and worked to provide social services to families in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
It’s no surprise that Hanna cites both figures as some of her role models, sharing their missions of improving social conditions so children can reach their fullest potential and redefining how communities should care for their members.
She also found inspiration in her own time. “We’re all the product of our teachers, mentors and peers,” Hanna says. “Folks who believed in us and made us who we are today. I’ve had dozens who didn’t laugh at me when I said I wanted to change the world.”
On one of her first days at MSU in 1988, Hanna met with Associate Professor Wanda Lipscomb to organize voter registration in the medical college.
Later, when Hanna first brought up the idea of prescribing cash to eliminate poverty, then-Dean Aron Sousa, simply responded, ‘Okay, Mona, how can I help you?”
“That’s part of being at MSU. It’s part of being in academia,” she says. “We’re supposed to solve big problems and imagine a better world.”
“And then there’s my mom, my grandma — the list goes on,” she adds. “So many people, primarily women, who have walked with me and walked before me have made me who I am.”
Finding her superpower
Medical care accounts for just 10% to 20% of overall health outcomes. The rest is shaped by factors like the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.
This frustrating reality leads Hanna to use the ‘Band-Aid’ metaphor often: As a pediatrician, she has felt like she could only do too little, too late.
“I’ve cared for so many kids with gunshot injuries. Why aren’t we talking about gun violence prevention? I’ve cared for so many kids with lead poisoning and asthma. They happen to live in southwest Detroit, which has the worst air quality,” Hanna says.
Hanna’s answer to these societal and environmental challenges has been to advocate for interventions that aim to prevent poverty, improve the environment and build stronger communities.
Some argue that such advocacy goes beyond a physician’s role, but Hanna firmly disagrees. “We should honor the oath we’ve taken to protect and be curious to truly address the health of the patients we’re charged with.”
Though her convictions stem from her training in environmental health, Hanna also attributes them to her family origins. “Being an immigrant has given me a heightened antenna for injustice,” she says. “I grew up in this country grateful every day to be here — aware of the privileges, rights and freedoms, but also of injustices.”
She calls it a superpower that has enabled her to “be curious, to give back and to serve.” After more than a decade educating students and medical residents, Hanna has bite-sized but powerful advice to share. “Find your passion. Find your people. Be persistent. Be prepared.”
Hanna has lived those words herself, by focusing on the issues she really cares about, finding allies in different sectors — from engineering to social sciences — and catalyzing lasting change.
“I am not a patient person,” she says. “Every hour a baby is born without the resources they need — that’s a failure on us. I don’t want to live with regret that I could have done something for kids and didn’t.”
Because of her urgent work creating a new model for giving countless children a stronger start in life, she won’t have to.
