How to improve healthcare outcomes for elderly populations

Policy Brief

Title – Primary Care Access for Elderly and Low-Income Individuals

Statement of Issue – Low income individuals, households, and elderly populations often do not have the base case needed to basic primary care service offerings. This ultimately causes concern for society overall as primary care providers are critical element within the healthcare infrastructure.

Overview

Healthcare is a very convoluted and contentious issue within the United States. The two primary areas of contention are overall access to healthcare and its affordability. Access to a certain extent has been alleviated through the Affordable Care Act, which mandates insurance for certain segments of the population. However, poor, elderly, and certain minority segments of the population do not have adequate coverage. In some cases, they don’t have health insurance at all. This lack of insurances within these populations creates higher costs for those who do pay adequate health insurance premiums. For example, individuals may look to delay seeking care, until the illness or injury becomes much more acute, thus raising the overall cost of treatment. In addition, many of these ailments benefit from preventative intervention through the primary care system. Illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes, and some forms of cancers can be mitigated if treated early on. If not, the overall cost of rectifying these issues becomes exponentially higher. As a result, programs should be constructed to help improve over healthcare outcomes for those who are poor or elderly.

Recommendations

The first recommendation is to first expand and advocate for telehealth, remote patient care, and other technological solutions that can expand access to services to the poor and elderly population. Telehealth and telemedicine are both cost effective methods in which to administer care without having patients leave their home in certain instances. In addition, human error associated with medical records, or inaccuracy associated with incorrect treatments or record keeping. This solution also helps to reduce cancellations by patients. Finally efficiencies are improved as delays associated with certain routine check-ups are diminished.

The next solution is to address physician shortages and to growth the primary care workforce to better administer services to the poor and elderly. This includes medical school loan forgiveness programs, the remove of immigration barriers for foreign trained physicians to practice in the United States, and to improve the number of residency slots available.

Conclusion

Primary care is a critical element within the overall healthcare infrastructure of the United States. Unfortunately many in the poor and elderly communities do not have proper access to it. By addressing the large physician shortage through expansion of critical programs while also providing innovative healthcare solutions, healthcare outcomes for the poor and elderly will improve.

Advocacy Letter

To: Patty Murray

Title: Chair of the Labor, Health, Human Services, and Education Subcommittee

Topic: Expansion of H.R 341 – Ensuring Telehealth Expansion ACT

From: STUDENT NAME

Title: Policy Advocate

Dear Ms. Murray

My name is STUDENT NAME, and I am writing you to address issues related to primary care access for low-income and elderly populations. As you are well aware, healthcare continues to be a major issue for a majority of American citizens. Here, the rising cost of treatment, couple with rising inflation and stagnant wages can create adverse economic circumstances for society. Currently, healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP currently stand at 18% with an expectation to rise to 20% in the year 2030. If this occurs nearly $5 Trillion will be allocated to healthcare costs alone. This, as I’m sure you are aware, is unsustainable (Stein, 2015).

Although access to healthcare has been expanded due to the affordable care act, both the elderly and the poor continue to suffer due to lack of access to primary care. According to the CDC, 3.3 million people within the elderly population have reported an inability to reported needed healthcare. This issue was exacerbated due to the COVID-19 pandemic which had the potentially to cause further sickness and death to the most vulnerable populations. Here, my proposal is to improve and enhance the telehealth act to better advocate for poor and elderly populations. Here, the benefits of both telehealth and telemedicine are widely documented. For one, these innovations vastly improve access to healthcare for elderly and poor populations by leveraging technology. Statistics have shown that cancellations are reduced by nearly 32% when healthcare institutions adopt a comprehensive telemedicine policy. As COVID-19 has indicated, physical interaction can actually be a detriment to the elderly population who are exposed to adverse healthcare outcomes due to the pandemic. Through innovation in this field, poor and elderly populations have a better opportunity to participate in the American healthcare system. Expansion of the bill will also lower healthcare costs which have consistently ranked the highest in the world (Raftery, 2016).