Excerpt from North Carolina Health Planning Commission: Recommendations; December 21, 1994
It is in the best interest of the state that every resident of North Carolina stay as healthy as possible. This requires a system which assures that preventive, primary care and other essential services are available for everyone, and that health services cannot be denied through loss of health coverage because of ill health, job status or where a person lives. More than simply affordable, health services must be available within reasonable travel distance for everyone. It ought to be easy to understand how to use the system and easy for the system to coordinate the care for each individual patient. The quality of care ought to be monitored, to ensure that all residents of the state have high quality, coordinated health services.
As simple and laudable as this vision is, it is very difficult to bring about quickly. It appears more desirable for the plan to be phased in over a period of time. Health reform began in 1993 and will not be finished for at least 20 years.1 Between 1995 and 2000, the short term goal is that all North Carolinians will have coverage and access to essential health services. The state will make its best effort to assure that each year between 1995 and 2000, more of its citizens have health coverage. During the period of time that coverage is phased in, the state will pursue policies and funding strategies to restructure the health industry from a system focused on sickness, to one which focuses on keeping people healthy.
The following lists the Commission’s recommendations about how to move the state forward in its goal of redirecting the health system in N orth Carolina. The recommendations cover seven specific areas and one general area: 1) expanding coverage to the uninsured, 2) controlling rising health care costs, 3) expanding services in rural and urban medically underserved areas, 4) changing the focus of the current health system from a curative medical system to one that focuses on keeping people healthy, 5) ensuring high quality services, 6) establishing a data and information system capable of meeting the health information needs of the future, 7) ensuring that the health needs of at-risk populations are met, and 8) recommendations for the ongoing work of the Commission. The Advisory Committees that recommended the same or substantially similar recommendations are listed in parentheses.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
