Inequality in US Healthcare System: High-Income vs Low-Income - Essay Sample

Introduction

When there is limited access to healthcare, inequality in the healthcare system is bound to occur. It means that one group of the economy is getting better access to healthcare than another. In the United States, there is a high rate of healthcare inequality due to it being the only developed country using the private sector health insurance to its citizens. Research shows that high-income earners get better access to healthcare than the low earning group due to the high cost of healthcare. Access to healthcare is an essential aspect of life as it helps a population to manage and prevent diseases, promote and maintain health, reduce unnecessary disabilities and premature deaths and also achieve equality of access to healthcare to the population. The causes of limitation to healthcare services include high cost of care, inadequate or no insurance cover, lack of service availability, limited access to healthcare due to limited time given for appointments, transport barriers, few clinicians, and geographical limitations.

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Healthcare organizations must strive to look into providing options of care that meet the population’s convenience to avoid limitations in access to healthcare. Limited appointment availability causes limited access as the healthcare providers close after working hours, making it hard for some people to access help due to their work or school schedules. The geographical, clinician issues also arise in limited access to healthcare as people living in urban and sub-urban areas can access healthcare more than those in rural areas. There are less medical care providers in rural areas. According to The National Rural Health Association statics’, rural areas, patient-to-primary care is 39.8 physicians in every 100,000 people. In contrast, in the urban areas, there are 53.3 physicians in every 100,000 people. Challenges also face rural hospitals as they are small compared to the population size they attend to. There is a limited workforce in rural hospitals, physician shortages, and have financial constraints that lead to rural hospitals not having less resources needed to provide good healthcare to their patients.

Transportation barriers hinder both the urban living population as well as the rural living population. This barrier comes up when a patient/patients are not able to access the hospitals, clinics, or pharmacies due to lack of transportation. Lack of transportation can be caused by the lack of one’s own vehicle to go to the healthcare centers, financial problems that lead to a person not being able to access means of transport and physical disabilities that hinder a person from walking. Ability to drive or access public transportation. There could be adverse policies that could lead one’s ability to travel to their healthcare provider. According to the American Hospital Association (2018), Statistics show that 3.6 million people don’t obtain medical care due to transportation hindrances. The lack of transport causes missed appointments to the healthcare providers for maybe medical reviews given on prior appointments or even consultation on a risen medical issue. Hindrances to the access to the pharmacy for drugs making there to be a decreased number of prescriptions filled. Limited access to healthcare due to the transport hindrances makes there to be a burden on the economy in the healthcare system.

The limited education that people have about care sites also makes there to be limited access to healthcare. In healthcare, it is not about the steps made towards the care site that matter but the steps made to the right care site is what matters, Most people are not aware of the care sites and what they offer. Care sites have been diversified and specialize in different fields to reduce the volume of people in one care site as well as concentrate the right medics in one care site in accordance with the field of specialty the care site provides. This lack of knowledge makes people go to care sites that are not for their specific conditions, making them have limited access to care. This happens because when a person visits a wrong care site that does not specialize in what they suffer from, care is still given but limited as opposed if they visited the care site that specifically deals with their condition.

Identifying Academic Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

The use of Summon, Capella University Library Search Engine, enabled my successful access to databases that were related to limited healthcare access. The use of keywords such as online health information seeking, healthcare access, health information systems, and rural nursing helped in searching for peer-reviewed article journals that were in line with limited access to healthcare. By using the advanced option, I limited my search to scholarly and peer-reviewed journals by choosing journal articles as the publication type and medicine and nursing as the subjects of my article. I chose recent articles.

Accessing Credibility and Relevance of Information Sources

To ensure that my work was credible, the peer-reviewed articles should have been published within the past five years. I made sure that the selected sources were published by authors who were well known in the field of healthcare for exemplary work and that they had extensive professional experience.

To ensure that the chosen sources of information were of relevance to the topic under research, I first confirmed that they contained accepted facts and opinions on issues related limited access to healthcare. I went further to confirm if each of the information sources had a clear definition of purpose pertaining to the information on limited access to healthcare and the solutions offered to solve the problem of limited access to healthcare.

Annotated Bibliography

Health Research & Educational Trust. (2017, November). Social determinants of health series: Transportation and the role of hospitals. Chicago, IL: Health Research & Educational Trust. Accessed at www.aha.org/transportationThis article outlines the role of hospitals when it comes to the transportation of patients who require transportation. It also outlines the new trends in some hospitals that set an example to other hospitals on how to help in the dilemma. The author talks of Mobile Health Centre’s that help in the provision of primary as well as preventive care services by offering door-to-door services to patients with a dilemma of transportation and gives an example of Calvert Medical Centre that has adapted that method. The author also talks outlines another example from the Denver Health Medical Centre that provides transport by partnering with a transport company to help in the transportation of vulnerable patients. Making access to volunteer driver problems as well as van services for patients with transport dilemmas are also added as strategies to deal with transport problems for people in need of healthcare.

Sera Heath. (2018). Telehealth Closes Patient Care Access Gaps in Rural Mississippi. PatientEngagementHit. Accessed from

https://patientengagementhit.com/news/telehealth-closes-patient-care-access-gaps-in-rural-Mississippi

This article outlines how Mississippi has helped in bridging the gap between healthcare providers and patients in rural arrears by the use of telehealth as a tool. The use of telehealth has been used in helping people in rural areas to access healthcare services while at the comfort of their homes. The author adds that The University of Mississippi Medical Center has enrolled in this service to help in monitoring of patient remotely, help communication between different levels of healthcare professionals who are within the platform, helping small healthcare providers in keeping their patients in the office and bridge the gap between the access of services that rural patients get in opposition to the urban patients.

Learnings from Developing an Annotated Bibliography

By creating an annotated bibliography, there was further enlighten on the scholarly articles available for the research topic, this knowledge of the existence of the articles helped me in choosing the most relevant and best sources from the different articles that I had viewed in line with limited access to healthcare. The annotated bibliography also help me in learning how to summarize the main points of an article.

Learnings from Research

I was able to gather facts and scholarly opinions on limited access to healthcare, which my topic of choice. This was by going through peer-reviewed journals that I had access to help me with the research topic. This research helped me in adding on to my knowledge on the importance of healthcare provision as well as why it is limited and how this can be changed so that a population can get accessibility to healthcare without limitation of this need. I learned more about Mobile clinics from an article from Health Research & Educational Trust (2017). Knowledge on Telehealth was impacted to me in the article by Serah (2018), in learning how Mississippi had implemented the telehealth system to bridge the gap between the rural people to primary caregivers.

References

American Hospital Association. (2018). Social determinants of health series: Transportation and the role of hospitals | AHA. Retrieved from https://www.aha.org/ahahret-guides/2017-11-15-social-determinants-health-series-transportation-and-role-hospitals

Health Research & Educational Trust. (2017, November). Social determinants of health series: Transportation and the role of hospitals. Chicago, IL: Health Research & Educational Trust. Accessed at www.aha.org/transportation

Rural Health Information Hub. (2016). Social Determinants of Health

Heath, S. (2018). Telehealth closes patient care access gaps in rural Mississippi. Retrieved from https://patientengagementhit.com/news/telehealth-closes-patient-care-access-gaps-in-rural-

Mississippi World Health Organization. (2017). Social determinants of health. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/social_determinants/sdh_definition/en/