By Matt Kuhrt
The Massachusetts law on which the Affordable Care Act was modeled has successfully delivered near-universal insurance coverage, but patients continue to experience barriers regarding their access to care, according to a story on MassLive.
Massachusetts has seen its percentage of covered residents rise to 96.4 percent since passage of its healthcare law in 2006, with 89 percent of residents indicating in the state Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) survey that they had a usual source of care. This tracks with national data suggesting the state and the Northeast region in general provide better access to healthcare relative to the rest of the country.
The access shortfalls noted in the CHIA survey were among Hispanics, low-income populations and those whose activities are limited by fair or poor health. Also worrisome from a system-level cost perspective was the relatively high incidence of emergency room usage for non-emergencies, as 38.2 percent of those who used the emergency room reported doing.
Looking more deeply into the numbers, cost of care appears to be playing a role in restricting access. While a little more than one in five respondents reported difficulty getting an appointment as soon as they needed it, 14 percent reported that a doctor's office had refused to accept their insurance. This has been an increasing problem, per MassLive, and one most prevalent among Hispanics and people with low incomes.
On the other hand, some of the access woes appear more systemic in nature. "People are still trying to navigate a system set up to best care for people during standard office hours," says Amy Whitcomb Slemmer, executive director of Health Care for All, an advocacy group. There may be some reason for hope, as her call for "real health system delivery transformation" echoes recent moves at the federal level to fund the transformation of healthcare networks.
To learn more:
- check out the CHIA survey
- read the story in MassLive