Response
Respond using at least two scholarly references/ APA format
Current National Healthcare Issue and its Impact on the Work Setting
One of the most significant healthcare issues to date is the lack of insurance coverage for patients and the continued high costs of healthcare. As a whole society needs healthcare, but fewer can afford it even with working full-time jobs. Here in the U.S., our method for paying for healthcare is where patients pay a fee for the services provided. When doing this, it devalues the primary care aspect of healthcare and supports a more volumed-based system so that the providers can increase the monetary gain for a payment model system (Park et al., 2018). There is no consistent way to make things perfect across the board, but there are ways to help such as bundling care and treatments and implementing monthly payments (Park et al., 2018). The social determinant that most affects this issue is the ability to have access to quality healthcare. Multiple inequalities affect patients in healthcare such as ethnic groups, social status, and economic (Broome, M., & Marshall, E. S.,2021). In 2020, the United States healthcare costs reached 4.1 trillion dollars (AAMC, 2023). “Nearly one in five Americans has medical debt, and affordability is still an issue for a large proportion of the population, whether uninsured or insured, which suggests that policymakers should focus on patients’ costs.” (Association of American Medical Colleagues, 2023). With that number of Americans being in debt due to healthcare, we need to focus on how to change the way we are billing our services as providers, offering insurance to the public as a country, and a way to offer more affordable services.
How the National Healthcare Issue Affects the Work Setting
In the clinic where I work our patients often must reschedule the procedures that they are scheduled for their pain management treatments due to insurance denying them. They will either pay out of pocket or reschedule. This impacts the practice as a whole: the nursing staff must rearrange the whole schedule, and change the documentation, and the patients will miss their much-needed treatments. Our case manager then works closely with the insurance companies to see what we can do to get the patient’s procedures approved. It has often taken up to 6 months to get just one injection approved. This process often makes the patient feel depressed and angered and leaves the staff feeling hopeless.
