Access to care is supposed to improve steadily according to your text. Discuss the impact of the improvement on access to care for major diseases such as cancer, strokes, HIV and other major ones
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Access to care is very often misunderstood, we think of it as accessing health services as we need, but in essence there is a lot more to it than that. This week’s chapter (Improving Access to Care) sheds light on understanding access of care for organizations, the providers available that would fit the needs in your community, and how to classify providers so you can make proper choices.
A big question is whether or not access to care in the U.S. has gotten better or worse. Before this question can be answered you have to consider several factors. Supposedly as you are all aware, the advent of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was supposed to make healthcare more attainable and more affordable. Depending on how you view the ACA, in some instances it has improved access to care and in some not so much. Let’s analyze.
Access to care has been influenced by so many factors over the past several decades: you have Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization (JCAHO) influencing hospitals in the private sector and the government on the public side. From a layman point of view it is sometimes hard to understand – if you work you get health insurance and you get services. None of us take into consideration all the issues that healthcare organizations and the government have to research and consider when it comes to medical access and medical care improvements.
If you breakdown the phenomenon of access of care as shown in your text in Fig. 2.2 -The Policy Purposes of Access Measure, you start to realize that access to care has different dimensions, and depending on where you are in income level, social status, demographics etc., this access varies. This of course begs the question, should it be this way? My answer to that in the broad sense is that we live in the richest, most sophisticated nation in the world and we have afforded ourselves this luxury, but in the meantime created a gigantic dilemma we cannot seem to control. Take for example the baby boomers; we knew that because of the advancement in medicine and Telemedicine technology, people live longer and hence our quality of life will be better. And yet we did not prepare for this change.
