Advocacy Project: Healthy People/THOMAS

For my topic I chose to do Access to Quality Health Services.  I think this is really an important issue and it is something that causes a lot of issues. I decided to focus mainly on objective 1-15.

Goal for objective 1-15: 

To reduce the proportion of adults with long-term care needs who do not have access to the continuum of long-term care services.

Progress:

The target setting method: Better than the best.

Topics Baseline in 2001 Target for 2010

Home Health Care 9.6% 7.7%

Adult Day Care 2.9% 2.3%

Assisted Living 3.3% 1.8%

Nursing Home Care 1.1% .8%

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act ensures universal access to emergency care without regard to health care insurance coverage, but there are still, barriers that exist to accessing emergency care.  So all of the older generation, whether they have health insurance or not are still able to receive care, but not necessarily the long-term care that is needed. As of right now they haven't been able to pin-point any progress, but are still working on it.

Disparities:

In the charts available for disparities objective 1-15 wasn't an available option.

Opportunities and Challenges:

There are now 45 million people who are without health care in the U.S. and The Institute of Medicine has estimated that 18,000 deaths per year are directly related to the lack of health insurance.  Many efforts are being focused on geographical regions where people have limited access to health care facilities. This will help in identifying the priority health needs for the people in these areas. A few of the many challenges that we are being faced with currently for long-term care services are home health, adult day care, assisted living, and nursing home care, because many older people don't purchase long-term care insurance thinking that Medicare will cover this.  Also older adults prefer to receive long-term care services at home or in the community, rather than give up their independence by moving to a nursing home. This results in a greater demand for home health care and provides more challenges in meeting the target.

 Emerging Issues:

Some of the issues in long-term care include topics of workforce, insurance, and consumer-directed services.  The quality of care also remains a big issue. Since we are in the age of baby-boomers getting older there is going to be an increase in the demand for long-term care services. This will cause issues on how to attract, train, and retain a long-term care workforce of health and social service providers.

Bill:

S.CON.RES.6 
Title: A concurrent resolution expressing the sense of Congress that national health care reform should ensure that the health care needs of women and of all individuals in the United States are met. 
Sponsor: Sen Stabenow, Debbie [MI] (introduced 2/11/2009)

      Cosponsors (5) 
Related Bills: H.CON.RES.48 

Latest Major Action: 2/11/2009 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

My Political Representative:

U.S. Senator: Amy Klobuchar

Action:

I would like to see more long-term health care information to be available.  Older adults need to have information to know that Medicare, which many rely on, will not be enough to cover all of their long-term care needs.  Also I think that there should be better and more home health care programs introduced into communities.  It should be required that every community have at least one home-health care service available.