About Healthcare

Here is a little something I wrote last night. Its up for debate.

Accreditation and regulation work hand in hand in health care agencies to insure quality of care. First of all, to understand their roles and meaning we must know the definitions. According to the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, ‘regulation’ comes from the root word ‘to regulate’, meaning ‘govern or direct according to rule and to bring under the control of law or a constituted authority’. Interestingly enough if you look at the etymology of the word ‘accredit’ you will see it comes from the Latin word accreditus which is the past participle of accredere, ‘to give credit to’, break down the word more and it can be divided into ad and credere meaning ‘to believe’. In fact, the word ‘creed’ comes from the Latin word ‘credere’. So ‘to accredit’ an agency is to not only give credit to the agency but to believe the way it functions is at a certain standard.

Health care agencies nationwide are both subject to regulation and accrediting authorities. The regulation agency may be as small as a regulating committee in a hospital or a state run regulation agency such as the Department of State Health Services (DSHS). These agencies ensure that healthcare agencies are following laws and upholding standards of care. On the other hand, an accreditation committee such as the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) upholds a nationwide standard of care. Their job is to institute standards and to issue accreditation to those agencies and organizations that meet those standards. A regulation agency is like a police officer in a local community ensuring compliance, whereas the JCAHO are the politicians that make the standards and offer their stamp of approval (accreditation) if they are compliant

When I think of health care and regulatory and accreditation agencies the first two that come to my head are the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and The Department of State Health Services (DSHS). I believe that the most impact on quality of care lies with the State run regulatory agency. The reason is that this agency can focus in on the hospitals in their state; therefore they have a more specific scope of jurisdiction. The regulation agency (DSHS) makes sure that regulations are enforced and quality of care is being given. They can closely monitor their state and thereby know what their areas of improvement are and work on improving those areas. The JCAHO, on the other hand, is a federal commission, and is physically unable to monitor all 3,537,441 square miles of this great country of ours. It is impossible to ensure that regulations and standards of care are being met on a daily basis with the number of visits they pay to a healthcare facility. The accreditation they merit to a healthcare facility is based on a belief that they are upholding standards of care. However the JCAHO does know with clarity that the institution is upholding standards of care with one or two visits a year. It is up to the State to pick up the slack and keep up quality of care.

I believe there should be less regulation of health care by the federal government. The individual states should reform healthcare based on the needs of their citizens. It should be more individualized this way to ensure that the quality of health care is in the hands of its state run regulatory agencies. I tend to disagree with opposing view that think with such a massive problem as healthcare in our country a massive solution is needed and this solution is the federal government imposing taxes and using its infrastructure and power to reform healthcare. This belief that the federal government has the power, if given the money, to reform healthcare is ludicrous. We already see wasteful use in our tax dollars spent on frivolous things, for example $3.4 million dollars of the stimulus was used on building one turtle tunnel in Florida (Huffington Post, June 20, 2009). Can we really trust that given the money the federal government will make an exception and not waste tax dollars this time? Additionally, half of all healthcare in this country is already being paid for by Medicare, Medicaid, State Children’s Health Insurance Programs and the Veteran Affairs. Regulation power and capability to uphold quality of care comes from tax payer dollars and that money should be left in the hands of the States.