Equality in Access to Health Services Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Equality in Access to Health Services - Essay Example Therefore having much available health services is not a factor in itself to improve the quality of healthcare but the utilization of such services by all of the people. It will depend on affordability and general accessibility of the service. According to Healthy People 2020 (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2012), it is important to have access to quality health care service in order to achieve equity in health and eventually improve the general health status of all Americans. This I think is one of the most important move that the state should make in order to achieve the vision of having healthy Americans, including all migrants, ethnic and minority groups, by the year 2020. Though free service is not always the key to have access to quality healthcare the state can definitely find ways such as moving funds to have an affordable medical insurance to cover all Americans so that everyone in America can avail of healthcare services as the need arises to have better chance s of improving health by making it available and accessible to ever individual at once. Poor access to healthcare also means poor health chance for the population, taking for example Texas, which according to a survey has the most number of uninsured in the United States and has a significant shortage of health care professionals making access to healthcare services difficult for them thus having poor overall health conditions (Code Red Texas, 2012). Total equality of access to healthcare may incur a long way of processes but the government should start eventually to come up big in realizing the vision of healthy people 2020. Government funding should focus first on having affordable health insurances that even the poorest of Americans will be able to avail. This may seem impossible for it may have an impression of wasting money and giving away insurance even a person cannot avail but with proper planning this step will actually decrease total national health expenditures for no one will actually be left behind in terms of being healthy and accessing healthcare. #1 References: Code Red Texas (2012) Code Red; the critical condition of health in Texas 2012. Retrieved from http://www.coderedtexas.org/files/Code-Red-2012.pdf Gulliford M., Figueroa-Munoz J., Morgan M., Hughes D., Gibson B., Beech R. & Hudson M. (2002) What does ‘access to healthcare’ mean? Journal of Health Services & Research Policy, 1 July 2002 vol. 7 no. 3 186-188, Doi: 10.1258/135581902760082517 US Department of Health and Human Services (2012) Healthy People 2020 retrieved from http://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/default.aspx #2 The Determinants of Health: factors that affect population health The differences of health status in population is greatly affected by many factors such as personal, social and environmental factors that are deemed to be determinants of health for these factors that influences the health conditions of individuals or group of people in a given population (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2012). Of all the determinants of health, social factors play the most important role in influencing the health status of a population. In a personal point of view, comparing social against environmental factors, even though people in a population lives in a community that pose potential health dangers, the