There are many people in our community who do not have a medical insurance. In fact, these people are not even provided medical insurance by their employers, the main reason being the high cost of health care. Facts state that the number of uninsured persons in the US increased from 30 million to 40 million, in between 1990 and 1997. Small businesses subside insurance coverage of their employees in ascending order of the cost of health care. As a result, 1/6th of the US population became uninsured by 1998. This further resulted in negative impact on low-income families. Therefore, the present study has been performed. This article focusses consumers’ perceptions of their health care needs and access to these.
Mainly two research questions have been addressed in this research study:
First, what are the issues related to health care? These issues are reported on the basis of interviews held with people of Spokane, Washington. Selected areas and communities from the city were taken for this research work.
Second, what is the relationship between the people of the above-selected areas and communities?
The final intent of this study was to create a database related to health care planning. This database would be extremely useful to the Spokane community.
For accomplishing the above study, a method known as “Mutual Collaboration Approach”, was utilized. This method had been devised by Holter and Schwartz-Barcott. The researcher collects qualitative as well as quantitative data. Qualitative data is obtained by taking interviews of focused groups; while quantitative data is obtained through a questionnaire. One important thing to note is “sample size”. Sample size applies to the number of people to whom questionnaire is provided or the exact number of people whose interviews are being taken.
As a final part of the research, ANOVA was used to find out the relationship between various samples and sample characteristics.a