Helping the Community and Advocating on Healthy Life Choices - Essay Example

?Patton-Fuller Community Hospital has been delivering health services to the community since 1975. The development and trends in the industry have been closely observed by our team through the years of our service. In terms of the national policies with reference to Health Insurance Coverage, Patton-Fuller Community Hospital is in direct receipt of the perceptions of the community. We could clearly observe that the public is dissatisfied over the insurance model that is followed in the country. The private governed insurance models are often found to negatively influence the trust of the people. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is seen by the organization as a milestone and a major step in health care reforms in the United States. The Act has provisions to ensure protection and to have an increased coverage. However, with reference to increasing cost of health care in the US context, the experiences at Patton-Fuller Community Hospital suggests that the Act could do little about ensuring affordability of medical care. One may argue here that the act included cost containment efforts. However, our observation is that it has failed to make any improvements in controlling the indiscriminate cost increase. In terms of perceived cost coverage, a major contributor to the uncovered expenses is the difference in the costs of services and procedures across different hospitals. There have to be policies brought in in order to standardize the costs for medical services across the country. Even standardization of costs within the hospital is very important as this would eliminate cost shifting. There have to be policy regulations on insurance premiums. Also, it must be noted here that premium packages which offers ‘quality full’ coverage are very expensive for individuals to afford., It becomes more expensive to get a medical insurance for an uninsured as their history of illness and other health conditions make the coverage more expensive. There is general consensus on the point that private insurances are more expensive and unaffordable. It has also been observed that people often weigh their health risks more affordable than the cost of private insurance. This perception contributes to the statistics on the uninsured in the country. It has been stated by a number of our patients that they are often confused by the complexities involved within the terms of service of the insurance provider. The complicated nature of plans makes it difficult for people to choose services. There must be policy interventions to standardize the service documents. Simplicity and readability of the service agreements have to be ensured through government interventions. The limited nature of prescription drug coverage is an important issue which has to be addressed by public policy. In general, the beneficiaries depend on supplemental sources to finance the prescribed drugs. It must be noted here that in case of the aged population of the US along with many other categories of patients continued medication contributes more to their medical expenses than the hospital expenses. In the case of the old population, they use their retirement packages and other supplementary sources to fill this gap. The recent development that the state has curtailed its budgetary provisions on drug spending is adversely affecting the older population with low levels of income. The pharmacy assistance programme proposed by the government and being implemented by the states is observed to be inadequate in terms of its coverage. The heath care system in the United States does not have a uniform nature. The benefit of the program primarily depends on the kind of the medical policy. This would mean that to an extent this system would depend on the buying capacity of the customer. The more you spend on the insurance premiums, the bigger would be the umbrella of the coverage (Thrall, 2004). This policy thus cannot be stated as completely social. On the careful analysis of the statistics of the American health care scenario, it can be found that this system causes huge variations in the access to health care. When some of the citizens hold comprehensive insurance schemes, few others do not hold any insurance schemes. The extent of the variation is corroborated by the statistics on health care access to American citizens which revealed that in 1991, 62% of the citizens were covered by private health insurance, 25 % by public sector plans and interestingly 14% had no insurance coverage (Thrall, 2004). This variation also makes the process of policy formulations pertaining to different aspects of health care difficult for the government. This complexity increases when it comes to critical and general policy issues in health care. Patton-Fuller Community Hospital has always given special emphasis on having focused efforts towards helping the community and advocating them on healthy life choices. For instance, Promote Heart Health Campaign and special packages focusing on quitting addictions are being currently run by the organization. With reference to the emerging scenario of increased occurrences of life style diseases, there has to be more policy level attention on improving lifestyle choices at a population level. It must be noted that life style changes in people are characterized by a number of changing factors in one’s life. These include choice of food, occupation, attitude towards life and health, and many other factors. Thus, there has to be an interdisciplinary approach while dealing with healthy life choices. Any policy intervention in this also has to consider all of the associated factors. In Patton-Fuller Community Hospital, we have observed that health issues relating to life styles are at a steady increase. The national data on these diseases also show similar trends. There have to be large national level campaigns to promote healthy life style. Policy regulations can also be brought in to regulate the supply and availability of food materials which cause potential harm to health. There have to be initiatives within community circles to encourage healthy practices. This would further contribute to the cost reduction measures in health care as there would be automatic reduction in the cases which require a continuous medical support. References Thrall, T. H. (2004). How ready are we for reform? Without a shared vision, getting there will be difficult. Hospitals & Health Networks, 78(4), 34-38. 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