Disparities In Healthcare

793 Words4 Pages
Through the years, there have been major focuses on improving American Healthcare system. Through the technological advances and implements of new policies, healthcare system has seen some achievements that include improvement of quality of care provided and increase in number of people who receive care. With so many improvements, racial and ethnic disparities in quality and access to care continue to be a major part of the current system. The first problem concerning racial disparities in health care is lack of access for minorities. A major contributing factor in the lack of access to care of minorities compared to whites is lack of health insurance. Based on Kaiser Family Foundation, 32% of Hispanic, 27% of American Indian, 21 % of Black…show more content…
With lack of access to care, the educational programs to prevent diseases or learn how to manage life with chronic disease are not as easily available to the groups without health insurance. Living with chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart diseases all require constant monitoring of such diseases, modification in lifestyle which such contributes greatly to the improvement of quality of life of those living with those conditions. For those who lack access to care, then such information is not widely available to them, therefore impacting the quality of their lives. That results in higher incidence, prevalence and mortality rate of such disease in those groups without access to care, which is usually…show more content…
For those minorities who are able to access care they usually have Medicaid insurance, which is usually associated with lower quality of care compared to those who are privately insured. Medicaid patients had a 22% greater chance of complications and a 57% chance of dying in hospitals due to complications compared to those who are privately insured (Rapport et al. 2004). The below standard quality of care for Medicaid patients is due to many reasons. First of all, Medicaid patients do not have access to all the physicians therefore they have limited pool of physicians to provide them with care. That is a result of low reimbursements, extra paper works, and a denial for reimbursement rate that is three times higher than Medicare and commercial insurance (Athena Health 2010). Those are all limitations that are placed on physicians, which further push them away from providing care to those on Medicaid insurance resulting in low quality of care for those
Open Document