Conclusion
The US health care system faces a serious problem that is two-fold: eliminating health disparities and refinancing health care to enhance efficiency and equality in health care provisions. Diminishing quality of health care and disparities across populations is negatively impacting our current health care system. Heath policies need to guide improvements to the delivery and access to health care and reduce disparities. Health policy formulators should pay careful consideration to enhancing data information systems to accurately account for the challenges they are facing. Resources should be directed towards enhancing cultural competency, capacity, and empowerment. And most importantly, health care restructuring should develop within social and policy networks. Power is in the numbers. Building connections between the multitudes of stakeholders coordinates a holistic understanding of health disparities and helps to convey corresponding responses that offer a possibility of giving a holistic/comprehensive formulation to a total transformation in the health care policy arena.
Refinancing the American health care system will require incremental changes and will demand the joint efforts of federal, state, and local governments, and various stakeholders in the private sector. We desire a complete health care system change in the financing, provision, and regulation of health care services. Health care policy-makers should consider both vertical and horizontal equity principles to transform the present regressive multi-payer insurance system into a progressive single-payer insurance system. Benchmarking the success of other countries, such as France, England, and South Korea, has provided a platform for achieving our national goal, of mobilizing resources and containing health expenditures.
Reaching a goal takes a lifetime .... [W] e need to hold onto our goals to eliminate inequity and disparities, even if we won't succeed in our lifetimes. The point of an ideal may not be to reach it but to let it guide our paths. When we decide what our vision is, all we can do is keep hacking away at it.
About the Author: . Schnequa N. Diggs holds a Master's degree in Public Administration from Old Dominion University. She is currently a full-time PhD student in Public Administration at Florida Atlantic University
