Health care
Introduction
Health care coverage is where a person has a legal entitlement or even reimbursement for the payment of his health care cost, and its mostly under a contract with a health care plan that is offered as a result of being employed in a specific company or insurance health company as well as a health care program offered by the government, e.g., Medicaid and Medicare (Collins et al., 2017). Access in healthcare is a timely use of a personal health care service to achieve a health care outcome that is good and appropriate. In this paper, we will examine the coverage, access, and cost and how they affect health care.
Cost, coverage, and access affecting healthcare
From different kinds of studies conducted, a relationship was found between the utilization of health care service and the increasing burden of cost to patients; this suggested that if a person ends up paying more money to get healthcare service accessing treatment will become less likely persons. Therefore, patients sometimes skip follow-up appointments or medical treatment due to the cost of health care service, meaning the higher the cost of health care service, the limited access they get for health care treatment (Park et al., 2017). In a survey done, it was found that more than 30% of the patients nowadays are paying more money for their coverage in health care than before, and many of the patients are avoiding the treatment of emergency cases due to fear of high health care cost.
Health coverage, which in most cases is under insurance basis, has been researched by many people and the kind of impact it has on health; a person who is under health insurance is more likely to access health care than a person who is not covered simply because health coverage usually removes the financial barrier that deters one from obtaining a health care service. A strong positive relationship has been found between access to health care and health coverage; health coverage, therefore, usually determines how often a person sees a physician and the amount of money he is supposed to pay when his coverage cannot support all his health bills. The fundamental effect that cost, access, and coverage bring to health care is that they determine whether one will have a better health outcome or not.
When a person is covered, he will be associated with having regular access to health care since he will not be worried about the cost, thereby improving his final health outcome. On the other hand, when a person is not covered, he will try as much as possible to minimize the amount of time he accesses the health care service since the cost associated with the services he is getting might be too high for him to pay hence reducing his health outcome (Huang & Porterfield, 2019). The coverage acts as financial protection from high health costs and unexpected health care services. Therefore, we can say that cost, access, and coverage mainly affect the health care outcome. Due to the high cost of health care in the U.S, people end up paying a high amount of money in their health care coverage, and that has been an issue which people have bared for a long time.
Health care access has affected many Americans since people do not get treatment because of inadequate appointment opportunities and a shortage of health practitioners. The majority of adults normally work from morning to evening, which in most cases is when doctors schedule appointments, this gives them limited access to healthcare when they want it, and only gets to see a doctor when they need it, which is not appropriate since prevention is better than cure (Hsu et al., 2020). Health professionals shortage has made many people not access quality health care since the professionals who will be available to them will be experiencing burnout; therefore, they will not be effective in service delivery in the health care system.
Approaches in circumventing these issues
To solve health care costs, health leaders should develop a mechanism to measure the cost of healthcare accurately and compare them with the expected outcome. Therefore this approach will focus on patients and the kind of conditions they have and not the services, procedures they get. In the challenge of health coverage, what the leaders should do is develop health insurance programs that will cover people who cannot afford health coverage without them reducing the quality of health care provided in the organization (Zhao et al., 2020). To solve health access, health leaders should develop home based programs where doctors can make appointments to come and visit patients in their homes by extending office hours.
Conclusion
Coverage, access, cost are factors that must be looked upon carefully so that patients can receive quality care without paying a high amount of health care cost, and leaders in the health care sector should work together in making sure that they become a reality.
References
Collins, S. R., Gunja, M. Z., & Doty, M. M. (2017). How well does insurance coverage protect consumers from health care costs?. The Commonwealth Fund.
Hsu, J., Qin, X., Mirabelli, M. C., & Dana Flanders, W. (2020). Medicaid expansion, health insurance coverage, and cost barriers to care among low-income adults with asthma: the Adult Asthma Call-Back Survey. Journal of Asthma, 1-10.
Huang, J., & Porterfield, S. L. (2019). Changes in health insurance coverage and health care access as teens with disabilities transition to adulthood. Disability and health journal, 12(4), 551-556.
Park, E. R., Kirchhoff, A. C., Nipp, R. D., Donelan, K., Leisenring, W. M., Armstrong, G. T., & Kuhlthau, K. A. (2017). Assessing health insurance coverage characteristics and impact on health care cost, worry, and access: a report from the Childhood Cancer Survivor study. JAMA internal medicine, 177(12), 1855-1858.
Zhao, J., Han, X., Nogueira, L., Zheng, Z., Jemal, A., & Yabroff, K. R. (2020). Health Insurance Coverage Disruptions among Cancer Survivors and Access to Care and Affordability in the United States. Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention Biomarkers.