Access to Health Care in America PDF Download

Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309047420
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Americans are accustomed to anecdotal evidence of the health care crisis. Yet, personal or local stories do not provide a comprehensive nationwide picture of our access to health care. Now, this book offers the long-awaited health equivalent of national economic indicators. This useful volume defines a set of national objectives and identifies indicatorsâ€"measures of utilization and outcomeâ€"that can "sense" when and where problems occur in accessing specific health care services. Using the indicators, the committee presents significant conclusions about the situation today, examining the relationships between access to care and factors such as income, race, ethnic origin, and location. The committee offers recommendations to federal, state, and local agencies for improving data collection and monitoring. This highly readable and well-organized volume will be essential for policymakers, public health officials, insurance companies, hospitals, physicians and nurses, and interested individuals.

Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309133181
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
The anthrax incidents following the 9/11 terrorist attacks put the spotlight on the nation's public health agencies, placing it under an unprecedented scrutiny that added new dimensions to the complex issues considered in this report. The Future of the Public's Health in the 21st Century reaffirms the vision of Healthy People 2010, and outlines a systems approach to assuring the nation's health in practice, research, and policy. This approach focuses on joining the unique resources and perspectives of diverse sectors and entities and challenges these groups to work in a concerted, strategic way to promote and protect the public's health. Focusing on diverse partnerships as the framework for public health, the book discusses: The need for a shift from an individual to a population-based approach in practice, research, policy, and community engagement. The status of the governmental public health infrastructure and what needs to be improved, including its interface with the health care delivery system. The roles nongovernment actors, such as academia, business, local communities and the media can play in creating a healthy nation. Providing an accessible analysis, this book will be important to public health policy-makers and practitioners, business and community leaders, health advocates, educators and journalists.

Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309083435
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Many Americans believe that people who lack health insurance somehow get the care they really need. Care Without Coverage examines the real consequences for adults who lack health insurance. The study presents findings in the areas of prevention and screening, cancer, chronic illness, hospital-based care, and general health status. The committee looked at the consequences of being uninsured for people suffering from cancer, diabetes, HIV infection and AIDS, heart and kidney disease, mental illness, traumatic injuries, and heart attacks. It focused on the roughly 30 million-one in seven-working-age Americans without health insurance. This group does not include the population over 65 that is covered by Medicare or the nearly 10 million children who are uninsured in this country. The main findings of the report are that working-age Americans without health insurance are more likely to receive too little medical care and receive it too late; be sicker and die sooner; and receive poorer care when they are in the hospital, even for acute situations like a motor vehicle crash.

Author: Ellen S. Deutsch
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030729737
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book presents simulation as an essential, powerful tool to develop the best possible healthcare system for patients. It provides vital insights into the necessary steps for supporting and enhancing medical care through the simulation methodology. Organized into four sections, the book begins with a discussion on the overarching principles of simulation and systems. Section two then delves into the practical applications of simulation, including developing new workflows, utilizing new technology, building teamwork, and promoting resilience. Following this, section three examines the transition of ideas and initiatives into everyday practices. Chapters in this section analyze complex interpersonal topics such as how healthcare clinical stakeholders, simulationists, and experts who are non-clinicians can collaborate. The closing section explores the potential future directions of healthcare simulation, as well as leadership engagement. A new addition to the Comprehensive Healthcare Simulation Series, Improving Healthcare Systems stimulates the critical discussion of new and innovative concepts and reinforces well-established and germane principles.

Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309076099
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Roughly 40 million Americans have no health insurance, private or public, and the number has grown steadily over the past 25 years. Who are these children, women, and men, and why do they lack coverage for essential health care services? How does the system of insurance coverage in the U.S. operate, and where does it fail? The first of six Institute of Medicine reports that will examine in detail the consequences of having a large uninsured population, Coverage Matters: Insurance and Health Care, explores the myths and realities of who is uninsured, identifies social, economic, and policy factors that contribute to the situation, and describes the likelihood faced by members of various population groups of being uninsured. It serves as a guide to a broad range of issues related to the lack of insurance coverage in America and provides background data of use to policy makers and health services researchers.

Author: William C. McGaghie
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030348113
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
This book presents the parameters of Mastery Learning (ML), an especially stringent variety of competency-based education that guides students to acquire essential knowledge and skill, measured rigorously against a minimum passing standard (MPS). As both a scholarly resource and a teaching tool, this is a “how to” book that serves as a resource for a wide variety of health professions educators. A seminal source of information and practical advice about ML, this book divided into five parts: Clinical Education in the Health Professions, The Mastery Learning Model, Mastery Learning in Action, Transfer of Training from Mastery Learning and The Road Ahead. Complete with high-quality images and tables, chapters take an in-depth look into ML principles and practices across the health professions. Specific educational content instructs readers on how to build and present ML curricula, evaluate short and long-run results, conduct learner debriefing and give powerful feedback, set learner achievement standards, and prepare faculty for new educational roles. An invaluable addition to the Comprehensive Healthcare Simulation Series, Mastery Learning in Health Professions Education is written and edited by leaders in the field for practicing clinicians in a variety of health professions.

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 030946921X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
The Social Security Administration (SSA) administers two programs that provide benefits based on disability: the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program and the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. This report analyzes health care utilizations as they relate to impairment severity and SSA's definition of disability. Health Care Utilization as a Proxy in Disability Determination identifies types of utilizations that might be good proxies for "listing-level" severity; that is, what represents an impairment, or combination of impairments, that are severe enough to prevent a person from doing any gainful activity, regardless of age, education, or work experience.

Author: Elisabeth Rosenthal
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698407180
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309217105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
During the last 25 years, life expectancy at age 50 in the United States has been rising, but at a slower pace than in many other high-income countries, such as Japan and Australia. This difference is particularly notable given that the United States spends more on health care than any other nation. Concerned about this divergence, the National Institute on Aging asked the National Research Council to examine evidence on its possible causes. According to Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries, the nation's history of heavy smoking is a major reason why lifespans in the United States fall short of those in many other high-income nations. Evidence suggests that current obesity levels play a substantial part as well. The book reports that lack of universal access to health care in the U.S. also has increased mortality and reduced life expectancy, though this is a less significant factor for those over age 65 because of Medicare access. For the main causes of death at older ages-cancer and cardiovascular disease-available indicators do not suggest that the U.S. health care system is failing to prevent deaths that would be averted elsewhere. In fact, cancer detection and survival appear to be better in the U.S. than in most other high-income nations, and survival rates following a heart attack also are favorable. Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries identifies many gaps in research. For instance, while lung cancer deaths are a reliable marker of the damage from smoking, no clear-cut marker exists for obesity, physical inactivity, social integration, or other risks considered in this book. Moreover, evaluation of these risk factors is based on observational studies, which-unlike randomized controlled trials-are subject to many biases.

Author: Institute of Medicine and National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309065607
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
America's Children is a comprehensive, easy-to-read analysis of the relationship between health insurance and access to care. The book addresses three broad questions: How is children's health care currently financed? Does insurance equal access to care? How should the nation address the health needs of this vulnerable population? America's Children explores the changing role of Medicaid under managed care; state-initiated and private sector children's insurance programs; specific effects of insurance status on the care children receive; and the impact of chronic medical conditions and special health care needs. It also examines the status of "safety net" health providers, including community health centers, children's hospitals, school-based health centers, and others and reviews the changing patterns of coverage and tax policy options to increase coverage of private-sector, employer-based health insurance. In response to growing public concerns about uninsured children, last year Congress voted to provide $24 billion over five years for new state insurance initiatives. This volume will serve as a primer for concerned federal policymakers and regulators, state agency officials, health plan decisionmakers, health care providers, children's health advocates, and researchers.