Contemporary Issues in Health Care Delivery

Health care delivery is one of the most significant sectors of service industry because it is the foundation for creating the healthy, prosperous nation. American health care system ranks well in the world. However, taking a closer look reveals numerous matters of concern because it is considered worse than in many Western countries.

One of the most vital issues in contemporary health care delivery is low level of health care outcomes. That said, infant and maternal mortality rates are high, adolescents’ health is poor, and life expectancy is worse than in the rest of the economically developed world. The primary cause of this problem is that some Americans do not have private health insurances. For example, in 2013, eighteen percent of Americans were uninsured (Dalen, Waterbrook, & Alpert, 2015). It is not a secret that these people do not have access to preventive and primary health care. It means that the risk of mortality is higher in similar cases.

Even if people have health insurance, sometimes there is the problem of the coverage of their insurances. This challenge is especially acute in the case of families with low incomes because they cannot afford insurances unless provided by their employers (Tebb, Sedlander, Baush, & Brindis, 2015). It is threatening because they do not have access to preventive health care and their medical needs are not satisfied. If such families have children, they cannot provide them with necessary care. Altogether, it leads to higher level of mortality among both children and adults.

Except for the level of income, there are also other factors keeping people away from high-quality health care services. One of them is the organisation of preventive medicine. Just think of a typical preventive well-visit. It usually lasts for 20 to 30 minutes. This time is not enough to detect health concerns, provide patients with necessary and adequate health education or find out whether they experience any complex health behaviours (Tebb et al., 2015). Even if such duration of well-visit were enough, there is always a challenge of confidentiality because many patients do not believe that their stories will not be revealed.

In addition to it, health care system is not flexible. It means that there is no distinction between preventive and office visits as well as the situations when a preventive visit entails treatment (Tebb et al., 2015). It is the issue of the insurance system imperfections. However, the absence of such distinction decrementing the significance of preventive visits making degrading the health of society.

Finally, Americans do not trust the federal government in improving the quality of health care delivery. Even though the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 contributed to increasing the number of people with health insurance, entitled seniors to receiving preventive health care services without a co-pay or deductible, and decreased the prescribed drugs costs, most Americans still oppose the role of their government in healthcare system (Dalen et al., 2015). This tendency makes it impossible to build the healthcare system with universal access in the United States.

In the conclusion, it should be said that the primary cause of contemporary issues in health care delivery is imperfect, inflexible system of health insurances. However, understanding that it is a real challenge can become an advantage because once the problem is detected, it becomes easier to overcome it.

References

Dalen, J. E., Waterbrook, K., & Alpert, J. S. (2015). Why do so many Americans oppose the Affordable Care Act? The American Journal of Medicine, 128(8), 807-810.

Tebb, K. P., Sedlander, E., Baush, S., & Brindis, S. D. (2015). Opportunities and challenges for adolescent health under the Affordable Care Act. Maternal and Child Health Journal, 19(10), 2089-2093.