Healthcare: Accessible?

Healthcare access is one of the major problems in our society. Although we have numerous resources, there are still thousands of people who do not receive proper care due to lack of information or lack of insurance. Unfortunately, many people are not aware of all the free and low price care that is available to those in need. This week, I decided to explore the web environment for healthcare access websites. This included websites that did research on healthcare access, provided healthcare plan quotes, or even provided information about providers around our areas. I came across ten websites which I found to beneficial for all my readers. Most of these sites exemplified the characteristics listed by the Webawards website for the category of healthcare.

My first step to finding information about healthcare access was to look for websites that specialize in this kind of research. The RAND Corporation website was a perfect place to start. The RAND Institute focus on policy analysis, and if one looks at the Healthcare for the Uninsured and Underinsured page, you will find various research projects on access for prison health, children's health and elderly health. The site is fairly easy to navigate and has links to the RAND Health page which provides research information on many health issues of today. The National Association for Healthcare Access Management also provides information on access, but it seems to be more beneficial for members than for the general population. Nevertheless, by having links to access reports on the right hand side, it does shed some light on the problem of healthcare access in its homepage. Two other websites that are also very easy to use and appealing to the eye are The National Conference of State Legislature Medicaid for the Uninsured page and the International Center for Equal Health Care Access pages. The first website gives information about healthcare for all 50 states of our country. The second one focuses on equal healthcare access for the world, and even tells you how to become a volunteer to help make this mission possible. Four other websites that I looked at now focus on actually giving you information on your options for healthcare plans, or on helping you self diagnose your any symptoms you may have. These websites are: eHealthinsurance, which with three easy clicks gives you health insurance quotes around your area, Healthcare.com, which facilitates the search for physicians and health facilities within your area, Kaiser Permanente Interactive Health Plan advisor, which helps you design the best plan for you within Kaiser (this website actually won a webby award), and VisualDXHealth, which allows you to input your symptoms into the website and it will give you a picture of what you might look like if you have the disease. The last two sites I looked at were more local. The LA Care Health Plan provides information for people who are uninsured and underrepresented on free clinics, low cost insurance, and options such as Medicaid and MediCal. The Los Angeles Free clinic website gives information to patients in need of assistance by letting them know that they can get healthcare, at no cost. It was very rewarding to see that there are some websites that care about the accessibility of healthcare, and I hope that my readers will find these sites helpful and will refer whoever is in need of more information to to these websites, because lack of knowledge should not stop anyone from receiving the proper healthcare.