White Papers: Alabama Healthcare Reform Proposal Executive Summaries

 : The state of Alabama faces many important issues within its healthcare system. The issues starts with the need for hospitals and clinics in rural areas. For instance, there have been 13 hospitals that have been closed within Alabama since 2010. Most of these hospitals went out of practice due to a lack of federal funding but some of them affected by other issues such as lack of staffing, patients and practice. The outcome of that leads to a variety of problems, one of them being the opioid addiction in Alabama. Opioid drugs such as morphine, codeine and fentanyl are used to treat pain and typically prescribed by physicians. However the problem is that opioid drugs are very addictive and have led to multiple prescribed drug addictions and have a big impact amongst those living in rural areas who can not find proper care. As well opioid overdose issues exists partly due to it being a temporary cure for acute pain, however patients constantly abuse it not understanding that they are facing chronic pain/disease that requires long term care. This leads to chronic conditions, which is also an important problem Alabama is impacted from. Chronic conditions requires continuous care or otherwise it leads to bad health outcomes. Chronic condition is a growing issue in the U.S. which currently takes up three fourths of the U.S. healthcare expenditure. Another key problem within policies of healthcare is excess hospital readmissions and emergency room admissions among the Medicaid population, which covers 72 million Americans. Considering the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Hospital readmissions becomes a greater problem as all the patients from the ACA will fall under Medicaid. The solution for these issues start with providing healthcare in rural areas