How This Chapter Is Organized

This chapter presents new information about disparities in access to health care in America. It is divided into two sections:

• Facilitators and barriers to health care—including measures of health insurance coverage, having a usual source of care and primary care provider, and patient perceptions of need.
• Health care utilization—including measures of receipt of dental care, emergency care, potentially avoidable admissions, mental health care, and substance abuse treatment.

Information about patient-provider communication is found in the section on patient centeredness in Chapter 2, Quality of Health Care. As in previous NHDRs, this chapter focuses on disparities in access to care related to race, ethnicity, and SES in the general U.S. population. Disparities in access to care within specific priority populations are discussed in Chapter 4, Priority Populations. Analyses of changes over time and stratified analyses are also presented within this chapter.

Additionally, this year the NHDR focuses on a narrower set of measures than the full set of measures tracked in previous reports. With guidance from the Interagency Work Groups advising the NHDR and NHQR, this narrower set of core report measures was established. The core report measures aim to be representative of the overall NHDR measure set; but, because they are fewer in number, they are more manageable for policymakers and others to understand and apply when utilizing the NHDR. For details on the process used to establish core report measures, see Chapter 1, Introduction and Methods.

It is primarily core report measures that are presented in the 2005 NHDR and that will be tracked in future iterations of the NHDR. However, the entire NHDR measure set will continue to appear in the appendixes; and, from year to year, supplemental measures (those from the overall NHDR measure set that are not core report measures) will be presented in the text of the NHDR as well. This year's report includes a small number of supplemental measures, though none appear in this chapter.

Return to Contents