Medical Care Access and Inequality

The issue of access to health care has been something of a moving target since the 1980s because the structure of health-care delivery has changed in various ways. Dramatic innovations in health technology have run in parallel with innovations in health-care delivery options, and the cost of medical care has risen at the same time as access to high-cost medical care has become less and less available to more and people. Medical professionals have long recognized the need to address runaway health-care costs but have been divided over the form such solutions might take. Managed care was supposed to reduce health insurance costs for all, but the number of employers sponsoring health insurance has declined from 77.7% in 1990 to 61.3% in 2002 (Huntington 2000; U.S. Census Bureau 2003). In 2003, the Census Bureau reported that 43.6 million Americans, or 15.2% of the population, had no health insurance, up from 42.1 million in 2001.

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o lack insurance or access to health care. The big picture of this is that higher mortality and morbidity tend to vary inversely with social class levels. In Britain, class is identified as such. A longitudinal study of postoperative heart attack patients in Britain found that patients who were less educated and who lacked such class-defined luxuries as access to an automobile were less likely than their demographically opposite counterparts to recover vitality or to have improvement in pain (Lacey & Waters: 2003). That same study found that women's postoperative experience was less optimal than men's, particularly where social functioning and physical movement were concerned. In other words, existing social-class health differentials were aggravated by an episode of acute care. In a British study using some US data, class differentials were identified as adolescent predictors of good and poor health-care profiles in adulthood. Such differentials range from the development of healthful nutritional and behavior habits to regular prophylactic medical care (Starfield, et al.: 2002). In the US, class is characterized in terms of demographic groups and income levels. The inverse variation between levels of good health and ready access
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Lacey Waters, Shawnee Kansas, John Rawls, Reilly Legge, , African American, White Levinson, Cooper Schone, Census Bureau, health care, Community Health, medical care, et al, health insurance, access health, access health care, al 2004, et al 2004, community health, african american women, world wide, world wide web, equality opportunity, american women, retrieved world wide,
Approximate Word count = 2421
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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