In approximately five years since the Deep-Water Horizon incident in the Gulf, expectations for essential changes in safety, access, and preventative measures designed to capture a potential spill related illnesses should have taken place. Louisiana should expand funding for Occupational Safety & Health (OSHA) in efforts to prevent future rig explosions. Expand care to assist all Louisianans with getting care, or create changes in preventative care and treatment measures to combat those unhealthy trends that have arisen since the spill. However, given specific numbers and comparisons with other states, Louisiana appears to not be making much if any progress to gain ground in national rankings. By comparison, Illinois has increased its overall health ranking over 9 other states ranking as the 26th healthiest state. The difference between Louisiana and Illinois however, is the effort both states would need to create in order to get to that top ranking.
Louisiana and Illinois have 8 core measures that affect their state’s overall health ranking, including: High School Graduation, Infant Mortality, Cancer Deaths, Children in Poverty, Violent Crimes, and Cardiovascular Deaths. In all of these measures, Illinois ranks better. Looking closer at three specific ones, Occupational Fatalities, Obesity, and Lack of Health Insurance can be traced back to issues that could relate to the Gulf Spill. Occupational Fatalities and increases in OSHA could help reduce future oil rig
The health status according to the 2017 County Health Rankings, St. Louis has a homicide death rate of 33 people per 100,000 (“Crime,” 2017). The health care clinician to patient ratios for primary care physicians are 1 to 83 people, dentists are 1 to 48 people and mental health is 1 to 272 people (“Crime,” 2017). The population that are uninsured is eleven percent and are between the ages of 18 to 65 (“Crime,” 2017). The Missouri Health Improvement Act of 2007 (Senate bill 577) seeks to make MO HealthNet a prudent purchaser of high quality care and the Missouri Health Transformation Act of 2008 (Senate bill 1230) which requires hospitals to report adverse events and the state to publicly report results annually (Health Care, 2013).
In the state of Louisiana there are a great deal of health care concerns. These health care concerns need to be brought up and discussed because the future of Louisiana’s health care system depends on it. It is essential that there is something done for the prevention and quality of care for these health care concerns. Having a healthy lifestyle will help to prevent short life spans and increase longevity of ones life. The health care concerns of Louisiana are asthma, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, infant mortality, and obesity. A lot of residents seem unaware of the health concerns Louisianans face on a daily basis. Which cause high number of deaths due to health concerns.
Our health is the most important in our life. It is what keeps us living and striving for success. However, in Texas it is seen as the contrary. The issue with Texas in the Health area is the success of preventative care measures and cost of care for patients with chronic or terminal conditions such as diabetes and cancer.
During Governor McCreary’s term, a bill was created to establish a State Board of Health and was one of the first in the nation. Kentucky was considered one of the most unhealthy states in America because of the lack of health regulations. This lack of health regulations
Texas has the largest uninsured population with an estimated 6.2 million uninsured citizens within its stateliness, approximately a quarter of the statewide population (Rapoport, 2012). In 2012, then governor, Rick Perry decided that Texas would not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This decision led to much debate over whether or not Perry made the right decision to leave upwards of a million Texans, who did not receive insurance subsidies and did not qualify for Medicaid, uninsured. These Texans fell under what many politicians refer to as the “coverage gap.” Texas decided not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act because of the effects it would have on hospitals, financial reasons, and increased number of
Contrary to what many people believe, America’s health status is not quite “up-to-par,” to say the least. Over forty-seven million people in the United States lack health insurance; that is more than 15% of our nation’s population! At first this disturbing truth seems impossible to believe, being as America is one of the most technologically advanced and economically developed countries in the world. “We spend trillions of dollars per year on medical care. That’s nearly half of all the health dollars spent in the world. But we’ve seen our statistics. We live shorter, often sicker lives than almost every other industrialized nation. “We rank 30th in [global] life expectancy” (Adelman 2008). Knowing this brings rise to the question: why are
While there is not one solid reason for the health of the American people to decline, we are led to believe that the uninsured people in the United States are the reason of it. According to the article, A Creeping Catastrophe according to polling firm Lake Research Partners “while 47 million Americans are uninsured, 91 percent of voters in the 2008 election had some form of health insurance” (Armstrong and Wayne 3). This equal to 15% of the USA population from that year. Now, of this 15% uninsured, how many are unemployed, homeless or really in need
The health of the American people lags behind those from other developed countries. Federal public health agencies have a wide range of responsibilities and functions which includes public health research, funding, and oversight of direct healthcare providers. It has been a long time since changes have been made to the way the federal government structures its health care roles and programs outside of Medicare and Medicaid (Trust, 2013). With healthcare reform on the horizon now is the time to invest time and money in prevention, not medicine, making it a top priority to improve health and prevent disease. Funding efforts at all levels of the public health continuum need to focus on developing programs aimed at such leading initiatives
Florida has historically had one of the highest uninsured rates in the country (Born 2017). Despite the fact that Florida has not expanded its Medicaid program, Floridians have gained insurance coverage at greater rates than many other states. One estimate is that prior to the enactment of the ACA, approximately 21% of Florida residents lacked health insurance, and this has dropped to 13% after the ACA took effect. (Williams, 2016). Other estimates have suggested a smaller decrease of 20% to 15% (Born, 2017). Florida experienced the highest enrollment in ACA plans of any state with 1.5 million enrollees in 2016 (Williams, 2016). Increased health insurance coverage appears to have translated to increased access to medical care. Shortly
For this discussion, I researched Louisiana’s health care reform after the devastating Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana on August 29, 2005 and changed the residents lives forever. The city of New Orleans was affected the worst by the hurricane. Before the hurricane, Louisiana already had high rates of poverty and a lack of financial resources that put Louisiana as a high-spending and low-performing state. There was a lot of destruction that took away some of Louisiana’s health care facilities so they had to figure out “how to rebuild the infrastructure, how to protect the citizens, how to reestablish and perhaps reconfigure programs and services (Morial, J.,2007) .”
The Center for Mississippi Health Policy is an organization that has an impact on local and state health policy. It is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organization that provides objective information to inform health policy decisions. The Center for Mississippi Health Policy is an affiliate member institute of the National Network of Public Health Institutes. The core functions of the organization include policy analysis, information dissemination, analysis of legislation and regulations, and sponsorship of health policy forums and other venues for dialogue. The focus of the Center is on the application of research to relevant health policy issues rather than the development of original research. The mission of the Center for Mississippi Health Policy is to serve as a catalyst for health policy debate, providing information to policymakers and the general public and communicating research findings that will stimulate dialogue and inform decision-making. The office is located in the state capitol, Jackson, MS.
The Zadroga Act allocated $4.2 billion to create the World Trade Center Health Program to provide testing and treatment for people who worked in response and recovery operations as well as for survivors. Disasters expose the general population and responders to a range of potential contaminants and stressors, which may harm physical and mental health. The unprecedented toxic release in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, created one of the worst environmental disasters, suffering from severe illness, such as cancer, respiratory disease, and other life-threatening illnesses without proper coverage to received the necessary treatment.
Healthcare is one of the significant functions of every state government. In the state of Iowa, one of the organizations that play a major role in ensuring Iowan’s community health is the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH). Does IDPH effectively manage to ensure quality health services in Iowa considering the ever growing population and the demographic differences exhibited by the state’s inhabitants? If it does, how does it do it? This study is a report on Iowa Department of Public Health. The report intends to answer the questions posed above and to provide comprehensive information about the organization.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stated that "The health of the individual is almost inseparable from the health of the larger community and that the health of every community in every state and territory determines the overall health status of the nation." It has now become clear that our economy in terms of healthcare insurance is not healthy; the healthcare system in the United States spends 1 cent of every healthcare dollar in the prevention of diseases and 99 cents on the cure. Our healthcare system is the most expensive and yet arguably among the least cost effective in the developed world. Despite the highest per person health care spending among the Organization for Economic Cooperation
There are many issues that are causing changings in the healthcare system. Population aging, rapidly increasing costs of healthcare and the growing burden of chronic disease are challenges to health systems worldwide. To meet these challenges will require new approaches to healthcare delivery and comprehensive population health management. Many states are not prepared to tackle this issue yet. The US has the most expensive healthcare system in the world with health status indicators that are only average in comparison