Healthcare Disparities in the United States

...

Study & Research

Several individual covariates were included in the outcome measures to adjust the predirections. Some included age, marital status, education and household income. Unadjusted estimates showed a significant decrease in insurance rates and in forgoing care due to the cost in Massachusetts. It was revealed that Massachusetts health care reforms had large and substantial effects in reducing the levels of uninsured, reducing the likelihood of giving up care due to cost, and improving access to a personal physician. Future studies should monitor long-term effects, main health outcomes that can’t be assessed in a short period. (Pande, A., Ross-Degnan, D., Zaslavsky, A., & Salomon, J. 2011).

Collaborative research is also needed to address individual and system level concerns. For example, some collaboration research could be studies on capacity buildings, enhancement of surveillance to better measure the progress, and improve health workers knowledge about what causes health disparities. Another reason collaborative research is important is because it improves resources and infrastructure for promoting public health programs and practice. Achieving these objectives is within reach if the best-practice guidelines and technologies to support effective communication, coordination and collaboration. If we want disparities to be eliminated forever, the populations must be served at the forefront of everything we do. (Graham, G., & Spengler, R. (2009).

Ways to Prevent

There is more than one way to eliminate disparities depending on your standpoint of view.

When trying to eliminate disparities, you should know that this cannot be done by one entity. Partnerships between government, communities and individuals are needed in order to eliminate disparities. Although these issues have been addressed, it’s important to collaborate with other resources and quickly apply proven solutions. This issue has also been addressed by President Obama. When taking office, he declared “Government should be collaborative”. (Graham, G., & Spengler, R. (2009).

When it comes to Catholic care dealing with Health Disparity, they have a pretty simple goal. This goal is to protect the dignity and honor the needs of the people they serve. They want to reach out to people who are indigent. People in the catholic health care efforts sit at the care of their mission and influence the ability to carry out the mission of Jesus. Disparities matters to those who see through the lenses of justice. Making the disparities be known fits into the community benefit work in numerous ways. Data can be a powerful tool, but it is less useful when analyzed and applied to hospital operations and caregiving protocols. If the access to health care expands, hospital cost drop, and patients will get better, timelier care. In addition to this, it will also expand the hospital walls to question what their community needs. For example, one community could possibly have high asthma rates and would want programs that address environmental problems of high rates of smoking. (Keehan, C.2014).

The Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) also have a goal that they value to put health care disparity to an end. The goal is to group and hospitals and physician practices together to facilitate and incentivize quality improvement along with containing cost. From an economic standpoint, this would be called the promotion of production efficiency. Racial disparities are well known in the United States. The reason being is because the differences where people get their care. This is because of the differences in the site of care. For example, hospitals that treat more black patients provide lower quality. On the other, hospitals that treat white people provide them with the highest quality of care. Programs and infrastructure to improve value will need a substantial financial investment. Due to the uncertainty of this impact, it’s critical to evaluate and address the unintended consequences of ACOs during the process of implementation. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid should mandate the reporting the reporting of quality indicators by race/ethnicity with the ACO to determine how big of an impact this is. Also, they can examine if the distribution of patients by race is associated with the quality of care the beneficiaries receive. This success will require influencing the pathways through which patients receive care. Improved care, increased care and lower cost are areas that are critical for segments of society. (Pollack, C., & Armstrong, K. 2011).

In order to eliminate disparities in health from a public health approach, the public health approach must take place in the context of a well-balanced community health system that includes promotion, disease prevention and early detection. If dealing with an infectious disease, the vaccine search will be critical. The polio vaccine, which was found in the early 1950s is by far the most dramatic. Volunteers worked with schools and school boards to put in programs for grades K-12 in s model that shows proper nutrition. Schools have begun to reach out to parents and communities and enlightened them with programs supporting healthy lifestyles.( Satcher, D., & Higginbotham, E. (2008).

The elimination of health care disparities is included in the Affordable Care Act of 2010. This law requires both, the collection of race and the ethnicity data and the reporting of quality performance measures stratified by race, ethnicity, and other demographics. Now that all healthcare plans and providers collect and report these data stratified by race and ethnicity, opportunities will surface to improve care for all. Solutions for disparities among Latinos will be the same as those for disparities among African Americans. Any action plan will require a tailored and multifaceted approach that will consider the local context within which patients and health systems must function. (Beal, A. (2011).

In conclusion healthcare disparity is a major concern. It may not be as important as hospital negligence or scope of practice, but it’s an under looked health concern. It will not be easy trying put an end to it. Millions of people die because of things that could’ve been easily prevented. Why they couldn’t just get the care they needed to begin with? Is it because they stay in a rural area, they’re economically disadvantaged, or they have a different race/ethnicity? What’s the reason for a poor person not getting the same quality care that an economically stable individual have? These answers will never be known.

---------------------------------------------------------------