Question

Discuss the impacts of a large portion of the population being uninsured and how this affects the health care system. If this continues, how do you anticipate that the health care system will respond to it? What are the ethical issues and the practical ones?

Answer 1

Inspite of the different laws there are still large population who is uninsured. The reason for them for being uninsured are cost of the insurrance coverage, low economic status,many people do not have access to coverage through a job, undocuments immigrants . Presence of these population affects the healthcare system as the rate of mortality and morbidity is more among the uninsured. These impacts are:

• Poor access to preventive health care and services for major health condition and chronic illness. One of the reason for this poor access among the uninsured is that many do not have a regular place to go when they are sick or need medical advice.
• Many uninsured people do not obtain appropriate care because of the cost of the care.
• The uninsured people do not have regular outpatient care and are less often hospitalized for avoidable health problems. Even when hospitalized they receive fewer diagnostic and therapeutic services which increases the mortality rate among them than insured people.
• Researchers have proven that the expansion of health coverage led to positive effects on access to care, utilization of services, the affordability of care and financial security among low income population.

With these facts the health care system along with the medicaid services will expand its services in order to provide health coverage to maximum number of people. New techniques will be implemented to make general population aware about the availability of such coverage and means to avail them. Ethically, these status of being uninsured affects the people when the healthcare institutions refuse to provide healthcare to the individuals without coverage. It is against the ethics of medical profession that an individual is denied of care due to inability to pay the bills. Practically the medical bills place a huge stress and burdern on the uninsured and threathen their financial well-being. The presence of these uninsured crumbles the health system when they try to seek health care from those center who are heavily stressed and under staffed. When the system itself begins to crumble under the strain of trying to care for so many uninsured people- everyone's access to care is impaired.