Transportation and Access to Health Care Services - Essay Example

This is essential for public health and assists in minimizing healthcare costs. Insufficient mobility may result in patients missing appointments, which further aggravates medical problems and leads to wastage of medical resources or may compel patients or even agencies involved in health care to pay for alternative expensive transport like taxis (APTA 2003). A certain survey estimates that 4 percent or 3.2 million US children were not able to access basic medical services at least once in 2004 due to insufficient transportation (Holden, 2012).

Insurance is not adequate: Transportation Hurdles

Access to regular pediatric care is affected by the place where a family resides. Normally, children in rural vicinities are most susceptible. Almost half, 47 percent in life in homes that are below the middle-income level as compared to 28 percent in urban counties. Equally, health insurance uptake is more in urban centers as compared to counties in rural areas and their environs. In addition, children hailing from rural areas are most likely not to have a normal source of care (Schoon, 1996).

Data indicates that the nearer the child is to a health center the more likely the child is to get routine care. Since the rural communities have very few health professionals and limited public transport systems, accessibility to transport turns out to be a considerable hurdle to getting regular care, management for acute conditions, and managing chronic health illnesses such as diabetes and asthma(Talley, et al,2011).

According to the data from the Children’s Health Fund/Marxist Institute for Public Opinion, 4 percent of children nationally do not get at least one appointment with a health care provider due to transportation limitations. For families whose yearly income is below 50,000 dollars, the figure rises to 7 percent. These challenges are more prevalent amongst African-Americans together with families that live in rural communities. Nearly half, 48 percent, of the missed appointments were for well-child visits, 11 percent were for acute care and 23 percent were for chronic illness management. Almost one-third, 31 percent of parents claimed that they were forced to take their child to a hospital emergency room so as to be attended for the problem related to appointments that not attended (Gulliford & Morgan, 2013).

This is the data that we applied to the present population approximates and discovered that almost 3 million children in America do not attend at least one health care appointment annually due to transportation hurdles. Such missed appointments lead to around one million potentially preventable emergency room visits. By use of 2003 MEPS data, we approximated the cost of these ER visits to be around 750 million dollars-which is three-quarters of a billion dollars that the health care system could save just by enhancing access to care via enhanced transportation to non-emergency health visits(Gulliford & Morgan, 2013).