Over the summer term, I completed a course titled, “U.S. Healthcare Policy and Delivery System” which expressed a large emphasis on the lack of proper access to healthcare for Americans. Today, many Americans struggle with obtaining healthcare for a variety of reasons. First, the U.S. does not utilize universal health coverage. Therefore, whether or not an individual is insured determines the quality of their care, thus, the access to proper care. For those individuals who do not have health insurance, all of their payments are to be made out-of-pocket. Out-of-pocket spending prevents many people from seeking healthcare as they do not wish to spend the full amount for a service. For example, I currently work at an optometry office in which the cost for a full comprehensive eye exam is $149. For those who have vision insurance, they might pay, at most, a $20 copayment. When informing potential patients of the $149 charge when not using vision insurance toward the exam, they often hesitate and ultimately, do not schedule an appointment with our office. In addition to the paying out-of-pocket option, uninsured individuals can either explore care from safety net providers or visit a hospital emergency room for acute illnesses. As you can see, these individuals do not have a lot of breathing room, so to speak. Another reason behind this inability to obtain healthcare is because there is a shortage of healthcare providers in rural areas. For those who live in remote areas and are uninsured, you can bet they are not taking advantage of healthcare services. They already have to pay out-of-pocket, visit the E.R., or seek care elsewhere, and then travel twenty to thirty minutes to a healthcare facility, that is, if they have a vehicle.
This is a large inconvenience and disservice to uninsured individuals. This is systemic injustice in the way that our healthcare system does not allow all citizens access to proper healthcare like countries such as: Germany and Australia, who do utilize universal health coverage. Factors such as household income and race/ethnicity determine someone’s access. In order for this to corrected, the ACA was implemented in 2010; however, millions of Americans remain uninsured today. The U.S. should make the switch to universal health coverage as other countries who do use it have better health outcomes amongst citizens.
As one of the factors that limit a person’s access to healthcare is race, this calls to mind John Lewis’ work, March, in which African-Americans were not granted equal access to just about anything that whites had access to in the 1960s. Even though Lewis does not address access to healthcare in the work, I performed my own research as to what this time period consisted of for African-Americans. According to The Milbank Quarterly, Vol. 65, prior to 1964, whites were more likely to visit a physician in two years of more than African-Americans, regardless of income. Considering income, poor African-Americans were the least likely to see a physician in two+ years. For those lesser-income African-Americans who did visit a physician more regularly, they did so on average of 3.1 times per year; whereas whites did so on average 4.7 times per year, even though African-Americans are more susceptible to suffer from chronic illnesses and had a health status that they rated “poor or fair”.
https://www-jstor-org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/stable/3349956?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents