Medical Care Policies

Healthcare Policies Health care policy usually is developed to address health care cost, quality, or access, or a combination of the three. Due to the nature of their interaction with patients, nurses are well situated to be effective, knowledgeable advocates for their patients. The impact of health policy and regulation when it comes to the nursing profession is not something that can be ignored. Healthcare issues are very complex and they involve the fields of economics and medicine and affecting the rights of individuals as well as accessing healthcare.

Consumers' main concern is quality while the individual and corporations providers are mainly concerned about the economic survival (Heller, Oros, & Durney-Crowley, 2009). One public policy that is influencing my nursing practice and I is the Medicaid policy. This is a social health program meant for families and individuals that have low income and resources. This is an insurance program by the government for people of all ages who have insufficient resources and income to pay for healthcare.

This policy was designed to address healthcare costs whereby people could not access healthcare services due to the cost. The lack of resources or income led to the inaccessibility of healthcare and therefore this policy was put in place to help those people get access to healthcare (Heller, Oros, & Durney-Crowley, 2009). This policy is definitely achieving the intended goals.

This is because according to a study conducted in 2008 to find out the impact of the policy the results showed that there was a 30% increase in hospital use for those with insurance. It was also noted that the number of procedures went up by 45% with insurance.at the same time the Medicaid recipients were also more likely to look for preventive care. Women were also more likely to have mammograms and the recipients of this insurance were 20% more likely to get their cholesterol checked.

The Medicaid policy has made many people access healthcare. Those who were not able to access healthcare due to lack of resources or income are now able to get healthcare because now they have insurance. With this policy in place most of the patients are going to be less worried about paying for their healthcare and hence they are more likely to come visits me as a nurse before they get into a critical state.

Well, now some of your patients are less worried about paying for their healthcare and thus will perhaps more readily come to see you before they are in a critical state. This means that as a nurse I will attend to more patients due to this Medicaid program being in place. Most people are aware of many problems with current healthcare systems. The lack of access to affordable healthcare insurance and rising healthcare costs is a very big concern to many people.

Many of the families are worried about getting sick or being injured because they cannot afford healthcare insurance or even the basic healthcare. Many people are often turned away from the insurance companies because of the preexisting conditions or illnesses they have. Other people even lose their health insurance when they lose work or when they change jobs. In many occasions is see people avoiding to go to access healthcare because they lack money to pay for the services.

With the Medicaid policy in pace many people are going to access health insurance from the government and hence be able to access.