#1 Access to Health Care: Improving overall health status
Equality in Access to health services is one of the forty two topic areas in Healthy People 2020 that caught my view as one of the objectives to have the highest importance in achieving a national goal of healthy Americans in the future. But what does access to health care actually means? According Gulliford et al (2002), facilitating access to health is concerned with helping people to command appropriate health care resources in order to preserve or improve their health status but unfortunately gaining access to healthcare depends on some factors such as financial, organizational and social or cultural barriers that permits or limit the said utilization of services. Therefore having much available health services is not a factor in itself to improve the quality of healthcare but the utilization of such services by all of the people which will depend on affordability and general accessibility of the service.
According to Healthy People 2020 (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2012), it is important to have access to quality health care service in order to achieve equity in health and eventually improve the general health status of all Americans. This I think is one of the most important move that the state should make in order to make the vision of having healthy Americans, including all migrants, ethnic and minority groups, by the year 2020. Though free service is not always the key to have access to quality healthcare the state can definitely find ways such as moving funds to have an affordable medical insurance to cover all Americans so that everyone in America can avail of healthcare services as the need arises to have better chances of improving health by making it available and accessible to ever individual at once.
Poor access to healthcare also means poor health chance for