Affordable Health Care in the US

Affordable Health Care in the US
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Affordable Health Care in the US
Problem Identification and Definition
Access to affordable healthcare in the US is a systematic inequity that needs urgent solutions. The affordable healthcare program was formulated to promote equal quality medical care, unfortunately, the health systems have been experiencing healthcare barriers that render the goal unachievable. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) polling, health care is expensive, and a majority of U.S families struggle to meet the financial obligations attached to it such as insurance and care seeking. Additionally, a prediction done by Deloitte indicates that the U.S. will likely spend over one trillion by 2040 as a result of barriers to accessing affordable healthcare, especially on diseases that require more finances on management such as heart diseases, cancer, and diabetes (Montero et al., 2022). Affordable health care is so significant as human life is incomparable to any amount of finance, yet affordable healthcare puts the cost of life at risk. Further, understanding the problem first requires understanding the challenges associated with it as explained.
The insurance coverage is inadequate which majorly contributes to the lack of affordable healthcare due to affordability. One, raising the finances to pay for an insurance cover is challenging yet the insurance cover does not fully compensate for all the diseases, rendering it insufficient to citizens. Some of the medical bills that citizens avoid are not just necessary but important, for instance, dental care, preventative screening, and pediatric appointments should be fully covered to raise a healthy family. The impact is felt greatly later in life as citizens end up with the burden of managing chronic diseases. The KFF polls specifically reported that at least half of the American adults cannot meet the healthcare costs as some have even spent a year without medical care such as dental care (Montero et al., 2022). The Medicare insurance cover does not cover all the services and as such citizens aged 65 years and above do not afford crucial services such as prescription drugs.
Additionally, stigma and discrimination of citizens from underserved communities and people of color limit their access to affordable health care. Patients are limited to services from facilities with standard equipment use to stigma on their sex, race, sexual orientation, race and immigration status. Surprisingly, the medical staff and clinicians have also expressed the stigma to patients thus killing the morale of the citizens to seek specialized support such as hormone replacement therapy or mental health services. Also, patients from rural areas experience a shortage of healthcare professionals (Montero et al., 2022). The Association of American Medical Colleges estimated that by the year 2034, the industry is likely to have a shortage of 124,000 doctors in all areas of clinicians, nurses, and technologists.
Possible Options to Address the Problem
Despite the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) the US still hasn’t been able to resolve the challenges as the number of citizens without insurance coverage increases. Further, systems and individuals are unable to meet the financial obligation of getting an insurance cover and racial indifferences continue to widen the gaps in the health sector (Shrank et al., 2021). To resolve the problem entirely, the country should primarily focus on achieving three goals, that is; accessibility, affordability, and equity. Hence, making sure every American citizen accesses health care since the population of the uninsured population is likely to go high to 10.6% of its population by the year 2028. Second, ensuring affordability by ensuring the ACA adopts the economic changes facing the country. For instance, some factors that affected the streamlining of the act are; increasing national debt, local budgets, stagnant wages, lack of financial security from citizens, and strained federal states. Third is equity, whereby eradicating inequalities when it comes to the delivery of quality healthcare services without looking at race, socioeconomic status, or ethnicity. Inequity was recently experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic where underserved communities and people of color lacked priorities. Therefore, some of the suggestions for the problem would be improving the affordability of drugs and therapeutics, expanding the insurance covers, and transitioning to value-based care.
Expansion of insurance cover
ACA policies have helped more Americans access affordable healthcare since its implementation in 2010 up to 2016. However, since 2016 the number of uninsured American citizens has risen while the 2019 pandemic worsened the situation with a majority of the citizens losing their jobs, and getting limited access to employer-sponsored insurance. Therefore, the country must urgently close the gaps by addressing barriers to adequate medical insurance such as political instability. All the Federal states should be able to expand Medicaid coverage to individuals through bipartisan and public-private partnerships (Shrank et al., 2021). The expansion of the coverage also requires adequate financing that is achievable through sources for new revenues, inherent trade-offs for revenue transfers, and deficit spending.
A quick transition to value-based care
Transitioning to value-based care will enable ci...