Health Coverage and Care in the South: A Chartbook
Section 5: Access to Care, Delivery Systems, and the Safety Net
To improve health outcomes in the long term, it will be important to ensure that all individuals are able to obtain needed primary and specialty health care services. Southerners have historically been more likely than those in other regions to report difficulty accessing and paying for needed care.
States are increasingly relying on a number of tools to improve provider capacity and reform the delivery of care including expanding the use of Medicaid managed care, increasing payment to providers, and revising scope of practice laws to allow nurse practitioners to treat patients with fewer restrictions. Even with improvements to the delivery and coordination of care, however, community health centers and other safety net providers in the South will likely continue to serve an important role in providing care to some of the region’s most vulnerable low-income populations including the uninsured, people of color, homeless individuals, and those with limited English proficiency.
Selected Measures of Health Care Access Among Nonelderly Adults, by Geographic Region, 2011
Number of Emergency Room Visits per 100,000 Population for Selected Conditions, by Geographic Region, 2011
Share of Population Residing in a Primary Care Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) by Region, 2013
State Variation in Scope-of-Practice Laws Governing Nurse Practitioners, 2012
Medicaid-to-Medicare Fee Ratios in the South, 2012
Use of Risk-Based Medicaid Managed Care in the South, by State, 2011
Share of Hospital Patients by Uninsured Patients, by Region and Hospital Type, 2011
Selected Characteristics of Public Hospital Patients in the United States, the West, and South, 2011
Number of Medicare-Certified Rural Health Clinics per 100,000 Population Residing in a Rural Area, by Region, 2011-2012
Number of Federally-Funded Federally Qualified Health Centers per 1 Million Population, 2011-2012
Number of Federally-Funded Federally Qualified Health Centers per 1 Million Low-Income Population, by State 2011-2012
Characteristics of Patients Served by Federally-Funded Health Centers in the South, 2011
