Health Parity Posted on January 9, 2008 Barbara J. Guthrie (bio) explains the need for quality healthcare from preconception through death.

Health disparities is the outcome of health inequalities, but the term disparities has been used. When you dispare, you’re comparing two things, and oftentimes, it’s comparing those that have with those that don’t have, whereas health equality, or parity, is looking at access to quality and timely health for all people. And what are the barriers to those and what structure and processes inhibit people from getting timely and quality health care. Because we have government-subsidized health care, but if you look at what’s available to people that have government-subsidized health care, it’s very different than those that have private insurance.

So it’s more than the haves and have-nots. It’s saying that if we want to have a healthy U.S. population, then we have to find a way to help people get quality and timely health care from preconception through death, and there are just too many interruptions. So the data that we got helped us to understand that there were people that did have good quality health care and people that didn’t.

Now is the time to establish a way, a structure and a process and policies that insure that all people. And I don’t know if it’s universal health — I don’t know what it is, but for me, equality means that whether I have a disability, whether I am African-American, whether I am a legal immigrant, I should have access to the same technology as someone else in reference to the health field.

« Back to Article