Access to Insurance versus Access to Care - Essay Example

"Access to Insurance versus Access to Care" is an important example of a paper on the health system. 
Access to healthcare is one of the significant issues to the quality of health while health care cost is one of the challenges to access to care and insurance has been identified as a solution. Access to insurance is one of the possible solutions to the accessibility of care and this paper compares access to care and access to insurance.

Difference between access to care and access to insurance

The main difference between access to insurance and access to care is the level of flexibility in access to the two types of services. Access to insurance is more flexible than that approach to care. In insurance, factors to inaccessibility may be temporary with examples such as mobility across jobs, variations in a person’s income, and seasonality factors (Gardfield, Licata and Young, 2014). Factors to care access are however more permanent and include location, rural versus urban areas. Individuals from rural areas have more problems accessing care that those who dwell in urban areas and this factor supersede people’s income. Low-income urban dwellers, for example, have ease of access to care than all forms of rural dwellers (Stock, 2010). I travel a lot and exposure to the distribution of health care facilities in urban and rural areas explains the differences. Healthcare facilities are more concentrated in urban centers and the high density facilitates cost-effectiveness and efficiency as compared facilities in rural setups and this cost factor as well as distribution explains the difference in access to care that is a permanent issue. Experience with the flexibility of access to insurance has however been more personal and was evident during my last job transition. The difference is important because it identifies factors to care and insurance accessibility and informs policies for more accessible care and insurance. It, for example, identifies the need for investments in care facilities in rural areas as well as flexibility into the ability to swap covers due to cost factors.     

Federal health care reform legislation of 2010 and access to insurance and the ultimate goal of expanding insurance coverage

Federal healthcare reform legislation of 2010 seeks to address access to insurance through two strategies. It seeks to make insurance mandatory to people, a factor that will motivate people to access care. This is because of the legal mandate that it places on people. The legislation also makes insurance affordable through cost-sharing and expanding public coverage. Individuals who were not eligible for public cove are therefore able to access insurance. The ultimate goal of expanding insurance coverage is to ensure the cost of care when care needs arise. This is because high care cost is one of the factors to the inaccessibility of care and expanding insurance coverage ensures the ability to meet care costs (The Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, 2013).

Unanticipated consequences of increased access to medical care

The scarcity of health care resources such as health care personnel is an example of unanticipated consequences of increased access to medical care. This is because the demand for care will increase while no initiatives have been put in place to increase resources for supplying care services. The trend in an increase in demand from the year 2007 to the year 2010, coupled with the effects of the 2010 health care reform suggests this (Tu and Boukus, 2013; The Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, 2012).