Vulnerable populations

Despite efforts and goals in the United States to reduce or eliminate disparities in healthcare by 2010, significant disparities, including risk factors, access to healthcare, morbidity, and mortality, continues in vulnerable populations. For example, studies find that Americans living in poverty are much more likely to be in fair or poor health and have disabling conditions, and are less likely to have used many types of healthcare. I believe that more effort should be made to bring affordable healthcare to vulnerable population

Vulnerable populations are groups who are not well integrated into the healthcare system because of ethnic,
This population is segmented due to a various reasons, culture, race, economic, geographic and even health attributes. Fears of being found illegal and or deported that a reason who block this population for seeking and obtaining medical care. One of the biggest health issues of these immigrants is obesity. During the first exam, many of these patients receive medical help for variety of aliments whom are obese, reveal seriously undiagnosed hypertension, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, or dyslipidemia. Payments to health plans and providers should promote quality health care and improved health and functional status for all patients, including vulnerable populations. Adjusting payments for differences in health or functional status is especially important for Medicare, Medicaid, and other payers that have significant enrollment of individuals with chronic illness or disability so that health plans and providers have an incentive for developing innovative models of care that best serve these individuals. Risk-adjusted payments are also critical to sustaining the safety-net mission of certain providers that provide a disproportionate amount of care to vulnerable populations, such as community health centers, rural health clinics, and academic health centers. The Federal government should convene high-level stakeholders to determine how best to implement risk-adjusted payments for Medicare. Payment systems also can be better aligned with quality care for