NHS FPX 6008 Assessment 2
[Student Name]
Capella University
Professor’s Name
August 2025
NHS FPX 6008 Assessment 2 Summary of Chosen Economic Issue
Healthcare inequality is not new in the US. As the population and the number of immigrants in the US continue to rise, the lack of healthcare specialists only adds to the stigma. Even though Medicaid as well as Medicare is a government-financed insurance option, many Americans might not be eligible to receive these services due to various reasons. The fact that 49 percent of Medicaid enrollees are under the age of 18 serves as an example of this. This number will keep going up in the years to come. This contributes to America’s unequal access to healthcare. Additionally, during the COVID-19 epidemic, many Americans without insurance obtained insurance to undergo pandemic-related urgent care. According to study, the number of Americans without health insurance will continue to rise through the known disenrollment period following the epidemic. The fact itself predetermines that the inaccessibility to healthcare will only grow in the nearest months and years (Twersky, 2022).
Lack of Healthcare Access Impact
Working Americans are sometimes faced with extraordinarily costly health insurance premiums due to the weight of healthcare expenditures that are increasing due to inflation and payments to medical facilities, etc as noted in NHS FPX 6008 Assessment 2. Some of them choose not to get health cover because of the high cost of these payments. I in my view encountered this conundrum early in my profession. During this difficult time, I had to make decisions like balancing health coverage with putting food on the table, reflecting the importance of a training needs assessment analysis to better prepare individuals and communities for such challenges. This put me in the position of having to pay cash for medical treatment anytime I required urgent care or my family demanded medical attention, highlighting the need for a thorough needs analysis for change in healthcare financing. This situation has been a popular theme in my circles of classmates and co-workers and is more likely to be familiar. Considering the
postponed health insurance, the annual health check-ups are not made, as the result, many people run to the emergency room when acute diseases develop (Duijvestijn, Ardine de Wit, van Gils, and Wendel-Vos, 2023).
Rationale For Healthcare Economic Choice
According to studies, those without health coverage are twice as inclined to have an urgent medical problem and wind up in a hospital as those with regular exams. Because of this, most of these people are unable to cover the costs of the emergency treatment they received. The healthcare organization that provided the service is ultimately responsible for paying the costs, which are often invoiced to collections. Over time, these regrettable but frequent circumstances cause healthcare costs to increase. The gap in the availability of healthcare increases along with the expense of healthcare, highlighting the need of analysis to understand and address these disparities. The storm of the unavailability of healthcare gathers strength with the immigrants and their family members who want to access healthcare without payment as noted in NHS FPX 6008 Assessment 2. The unpaid healthcare expenses eventually end up absorbing and contributing to the national expenditure on healthcare costs (Riley, 2012).
Economic Healthcare Gap Analysis
The primary cause of the absence of entree to healthcare in the United States is the expense of health care. According to recent surveys, the usual yearly charge of healthcare in the United States is $13,000 per person. In addition, the total cost of healthcare in the United States is 4.3 trillion, and it will continue to rise beyond 2021.It is impossible to overlook the differences in healthcare access across people of different races, nationalities, and origins. Whether they have money for it or not, many immigrant families that enter the US illegally are able to access healthcare, which demonstrates the need for analysis of how resources are allocated and managed. According to recent data from the Joint Center of Political and Financial Educations, the United
States spent about 1.5 trillion dollars in three years on net medical expenses for minority groups, including immigrant families. This statistic demonstrates the disparity in minority groups’ access to healthcare, which raises healthcare costs in the US (Riley 2012).
Need to Address Lack of Healthcare Access
As the population in America continues to grow in number year after year, whether through natural birth or immigration, the unavailability of healthcare is an imbalance that must be corrected. Healthcare cost in the US is the main reason why people cannot access healthcare as highlighted in NHS FPX 6008 Assessment 2. There are a lot of people in America who cannot afford their health insurance as the premiums they pay are very high to their employers. Consequently, routine health examination is exceeded, and emergency medical care becomes required by each uninsured person, underscoring the importance of a thorough needs analysis in addressing gaps in healthcare access. The necessity to counter the absence of healthcare access is crucial in order to alleviate the vicious circle in the US that will inevitably lead to the further rise of the cost of healthcare, thus making it even more challenging to access it. Due to the lack of access to healthcare, many people now lead unhealthy lifestyles that include poor dental and vision health as well as general health issues. This makes it impossible to prevent or control disease, avoid preventable impairment, and in certain cases, premature deaths (Palombini, Vereen, Taghiani, & Chitre, 2023).
Potential Implementation and Change Plans
A potential solution to the absence of healthcare is to increase the reach of government-funded coverage, such as Medicaid, which would cover more children and grown-ups and provide them with regular inspections and crucial care. This initiative would be a move toward tackling the lack of healthcare entree in the country, even though it may result in additional costs, such as increased taxes, but research suggests that the Medicaid expansion would provide healthcare to a large percentage of Americans (children and the elderly). Recent studies claim that
nearly 32 million Americans were uninsured in 2020, despite the fact that all 32 million of these individuals were employed or dependents of employees (Lee and Winters, 2022).
Transportation may pose a challenge to many patients living in rural places in accessing healthcare as emphasized in NHS FPX 6008 Assessment 2. This could mean that most residents of these communities are unable or unwilling to travel hundreds of miles in search of medical attention. One solution to this problem would be to expand telehealth to offer broadcast and triage to rural residents. E.g. easy to cure and treat cases like sinus infections, colds and migraine can be resolved by medicines given by local pharmacies within rural communities. Another option that may be explored by the American government is to invest in mobile clinics that can service the rural population. General health checkups, injections, vaccines, and simple treatment drugs can be offered by mobile clinics to people in the rural communities as noted in NHS FPX 6008 Assessment 2. The development of free-standing emergency centers will also be beneficial to the rural population that requires immediate services (Coombs, Campbell, and Caringi, 2022).
Predicted Outcome and Opportunities for Growth
Starting with the Medicaid growth program in all states of the US, the forecasted outcome of the expansion would see many Americans recover healthcare coverage by many thousands. Expanding healthcare coverage, in turn, would expand consistent checkups among children, young adults, and older adults. Consistent medical examination and preventive health care would probably reduce the rate of sickness and emergency visits. Through telehealth services, patients are able to communicate with nurses and doctors and seek their help on their ailments. This will help to save patients the distance they have to cover and will help them access healthcare services more quickly. This will improve the number of emergency appointments and crucial care visits in all populations in the rural areas. Finally, there would be free-standing rural-based emergency departments where critical care could be received by individuals in need (Humayun, Almufareh, Al-Quayed, Sulaiman, and Alatiyyah, 2023).
Economic Considerations
As the latest studies showed, the lack of healthcare access can be analyzed through numerous socioeconomic considerations. After starting with race and minority groups, it does not require any further enhancement, e.g. that African Americans earn less as compared to white Americans and they also live less. The minority groups like the African Americans can access healthcare all over the US through the Medicaid expansion program. (Although this is one of the examples of minority group, there are other numerous groups and races that make up the minority in the US).
Minority groups would have easier getting urgent, follow-up, and regular medical care if health expanded coverage were implemented. The expansion of Medicaid would make healthcare accessible to families with low incomes, even though minority groups are frequently low-income households.
Low-income families and minority groups such as African Americans, American Indians, Native Alaskans, and most others would also have relatively easy access to telehealth services. Moreover, telehealth services would be extremely helpful to patients in rural settings because it is easy and does not require them to drive for a long distance as highlighted in NHS FPX 6008 Assessment 2. Telehealth would reduce the racial and ethnic difference among patients who have limited or no access to healthcare organizations. Any patient, irrespective of whether one is able to travel or not, as well as his or her ethnicity, can access medical services in a timely manner with the availability of healthcare services like telehealth and remote emergency departments. This would help reduce the economic disparity between low-income families and minority groups and help them draw nearer to healthcare (Bailey et al., 2021).
Conclusion
In the US, entree to health care is becoming a bigger problem as noted in NHS FPX 6008 Assessment 2. Low-income peoples and minority groups are largely responsible for the lack of simple access for a number of reasons. The disparity in America is further exacerbated by the detail that older people in rural parts typically lack access to transport to a medical institution. Telehealth allows for a visit with a doctor using technology like FaceTime and Zoom calls, which can be done by anyone who cannot be physically present during the visit. In the telehealth discussion, the medical doctor is able to triage properly the status of the patient and whether he or she needs urgent care or just a prescription, as an example. To alleviate the state of inaccessibility to health care in the US, the government, healthcare officials, medical professionals and healthcare executives must collaborate in creating access to healthcare to all people irrespective of their racial, gender, and ethnic backgrounds.
References
Bailey, J. E., Gurgol, C., Pan, E., Njie, S., Emmett, S., Gatwood, J., Gauthier, L., Rosas, L. G., Kearney, S. M., Samantha, K. R., Lawrence, R. H., Margolis, K. L., Osunkwo, I., Wilfley, D., & Shah, V. O. (2021). Early patient-centered outcomes research experience with the use of telehealth to address disparities: Scoping review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, https://doi.org/10.2196/28503
Coombs, N. C., Campbell, D. G., & Caringi, J. (2022). A qualitative study of rural healthcare providers’ views of social, cultural, and programmatic barriers to healthcare access. BMC Health Services Research, 22, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-022-07829-2
Duijvestijn, M., Ardine de Wit, G., van Gils, P.,F., & Wendel-Vos, G. (2023). Impact of physical activity on healthcare costs: A systematic review. BMC Health Services Research, 23, 1- 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-023-09556-8
Humayun, M., Almufareh, M. F., Al-Quayed, F., Sulaiman, A. A., & Alatiyyah, M. (2023). Improving healthcare facilities in remote areas using cutting-edge technologies. Applied Sciences, 13(11), 6479. https://doi.org/10.3390/app13116479
Lee, J. Y., & Winters, J. V. (2022). State Medicaid expansion and the self-employed. Small Business Economics, 59(3), 925-954. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-021-00559-5
Palombini, M., Vereen, T., Taghiani, J., & Chitre, T. (2023). Building a framework for a more inclusive healthcare system. Telehealth and Medicine Today, 8(3) https://doi.org/10.30953/thmt.v8.414
Riley W. J. (2012). Health disparities: Gaps in access, quality and affordability of medical care. Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association, 123, 167– 174.
Twersky, S. E. (2022). Do state laws reduce uptake of Medicaid/CHIP by U.S. citizen children in immigrant families: Evaluating evidence for a chilling effect. International Journal for Equity in Health, 21, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-022-01651-2
