Why is this important?
Health care continues to be a crucial issue for Long Islanders.  Ensuring that all residents, children and adult, have access to quality care that they can afford is an essential ingredient in the social fabric.  It is a well-established fact that when people have access to preventive care, they stay healthier, and recover more quickly when they do fall ill or get injured.  In contrast, when people do not seek preventive care or delay treatment for possible or actual symptoms, their conditions tend to be more serious, they take longer to heal, and overall treatment is more expensive.  

As the recent national debates on healthcare reform have shown, the issues of access, cost, and quality are both complex and intertwined with one another.  Many factors influence access, including the availability of primary care physicians and specialists, the costs for their services, and the ability of people to pay for those services and/or for the health insurance that may cover the bulk of those costs.  While it is evident that quality medical care does not come cheap, at the same time, it is often pointed out that our healthcare system has many inefficiencies that raise costs.  Moreover, most health insurance coverage in the United States is employment based.  That means that the overall state of the economy, especially with respect to unemployment rates, has a direct impact on people’s access to the healthcare system.  As has become all too apparent in the past three years, people do not simply lose their paycheck when they are laid off or downsized, but quite often lose their insurance coverage, as well.  Recent studies show quite clearly that those without healthcare coverage are less likely to seek treatment for their medical conditions.  And in the long run, there are costs both to the individual, but also to society, when people do not seek medical attention when it is called for: minor illnesses become serious, and serious ones become debilitating or even fatal.

How are we doing?
We have examined several facets of the state of healthcare on Long Island, including how people pay for medical attention, measures of maternal and perinatal health and risk factors, and indicators of hospitalizations for preventable or treatable conditions.  In all three realms, our analysis suggests that while the overall picture on average appears to be positive, that there are also significant signs of polarized inequality with respect to the health of our population and access to quality care.  In addition, recent trends suggest that the prolonged national recession has had a negative impact on our healthcare system.