Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay: Barriers to access to healthcare

Barriers to access to healthcare
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October 11, 2020
The need for proper access to healthcare is as essential in a fully-functioning society as is the availability of food, water, and shelter. Healthcare not only acts as a curative measure for sicknesses, ailments, and diseases but also as a preventive measure to obtain and maintain the highest quality of health possible among people. Healthcare is so essential that multiple international human rights documents have acknowledged that everyone is right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health as a human right, as can be seen, for example, in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Although despite its compelling nature, and the emphasis of its importance by a variety of persons from international human rights organizations to local healthcare professionals, not everyone has reasonable access to proper and sound healthcare. Healthcare access is pockmarked with multiple barriers and issues ranging from political, economic, to sociocultural.
This paper will discuss the main obstacles experienced by people who do not have sound or reasonable access to healthcare and some ways and recommendations to solve these obstacles.
The healthcare access problem
There must be a definition of what healthcare access is for there first to be an explanation or discourse on what exactly constitutes "equitable" healthcare access. A general definition of healthcare is the "prevention of death and disability, the relief of pain and suffering, the restoration of functioning" (Gold, 1998). Healthcare is, therefore, all-encompassing, from prevention to cure. Healthcare access is the ability to get the needed healthcare and get good healthcare—healthcare that is of quality, and which is genuinely efficacious to serve the purposes it is sought out for.
The healthcare access problem is a systemic one. It entails economic issues and geographic, sociocultural, and even political problems (Gold, 1998). The healthcare access issue's economic face is primarily concerned with the price of healthcare—from insurance coverage to the price of premiums relative to the earning capacities and incomes of the patients. The geographic face of healthcare access deals with healthcare centers and providers' actual physical presence to a community—towns far flung from the city center may not experience the same quality of healthcare available to those living in urban areas. The sociocultural problem is anchored on the norms of perception by people towards healthcare institutions, such as, interestingly, the tendency of the people to favor alternative medicines such as dietary supplements that are not backed up by sound ...