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Show Section 4: Health Care Costs, Access, and Quality The effectiveness of health care is often evaluated in terms of costs, access, and quality. An ideal health care system would be one in which costs were low, care accessible, and quality was high. However, in reality, compromises inevitably occur. The three areas are closely linked; changes to one area can impact the other two. Policy considerations that focus on one (cost, for example) must consider potential effects on the others (access and quality). For this reason, it would be helpful to be able to measure the three. At present, there are available measures of health care costs and access, although their precision and timeliness are problematic. Measuring quality remains even more elusive; it is difficult to quantify. The Utah Department of Health's Office of Data Analysis is currently restructuring the model by which they evaluate health care expenditures. New data regarding state health care expenditures will be available in next years issue of Utah's Health. Data in this section include total and per capita personal health care expenditures. The average annual rate of increase in personal health care expenditures has been falling since the early 1980s. However, health care spending as a percentage of per capita income has increased for Utahns during the same time. Therefore, increases in health care spending continue to outpace inflation. Several measures of hospital utilization follow the cost data. Utah appears to have lower utilization than the U.S. in these measures. This may reflect differences in practice patterns, cost containment measures, and/or Utah's generally younger, healthier population. Access to health care is complicated in Utah, given that a large area of the state is rural or frontier in nature. Most of the 29 counties in the state have been identified as health professional shortage areas (HPSA), meaning designated areas that have too few health care providers for a given population, as illustrated in the Utah and U.S. HPSA maps. As in other mountain states, recruiting and retaining providers for outlying areas remains a challenge. 130 |
