Health Law, Regulation, and Policy

In the civilized countries, the regulation of various relationships between the citizens and governmental and non-governmental agencies is done through different laws and policies. Addressing diverse domains of human activity, legislations establish frameworks, according to which all citizens have an equal level of access to different services and are equal in their social rights in general. The healthcare sector is not an exception regarding this description as various health care policies and legal regulations allow meeting the rights of the individuals for medical care and treatment. One of these laws is the Civil Rights Act, which targets such problems as discrimination of the citizens in various spheres of their social and private life. Originally developed as an anti-discrimination act, the Civil Rights Act ensures that each citizen of the US is free from any form of institutional discrimination. The latter means that the citizens of the US should not be the subjects of discrimination in education, medicine, employment, housing, including religious and ethnic forms of discrimination.

The analysis of the role of the Civil Rights Act in the healthcare industry demonstrates that its regulations are critical for granting one their basic civil freedoms. Likewise, the relation of the law to the local health care policies and other legal frameworks allows the citizens to access health care services of a high quality disregarding possible restrictions. Therefore, the Civil Rights Act plays a crucial role in ensuring that the population of the US meets its health care needs, which are characterized by it as the fundamental human rights.

The Civil Rights Act and Policy in Health Care

The analysis of the relationship between the guidelines of the Civil Rights Act and different health care policies demonstrates that the act regulates other federal and local policies by excluding their possibility to discriminate against the citizens and denying them rights for health care services. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a federal legislation that prohibits social discrimination in various settings, including education, healthcare, accommodation, etc. (“Find Law,” 2017). In particular, title VI of the Civil Rights Act ensures that no individual in the US faces discrimination on the basis of his or her color, race, national origin, religion, gender, and others (“Find Law,” 2017). Being a federal law, the act has a stronger legal power than any state or local act or policy that might possibly discriminate against the individual in the regard to his or her health care needs.

The analysis of the examples of the Civil Rights Act’s regulatory power regarding local health care policies supports the argument that it has a stronger power and influence on other laws. For example, Flores (2014) argues that in the US, there is a warning statistic of impairment of health care services due to language barriers. The scholar claims that the adverse effects of this gap in local and state health care policy include drug overdoses, repetitive hospitalizations, and even patient’s mortality shortly after hospital admission (Floews, 2014). The application of the power of the Civil Rights Act to these cases leads to a conclusion that the local health care policies fail to meet its demands, which is a subject of initiating a legal process against them. In each of such cases, the stakeholders of the health care institution are responsible for discriminating against their patients due to the absence of local policies that would forbid the discrimination on the basis of language competencies. Thus, the Civil Rights Act obliges every hospital and clinic to create the procedure of instructing patients in their languages in an oral or written form for ensuring the quality of care and treatment.

Legislative and Institutional Policies in Health Care

The power of the Civil Rights Act at the highest level has a positive impact on the specific institutional policies in health care that may possibly discriminate against the individuals by restricting their access to care and treatment. For example, several decades ago, some of the US clinics and hospitals restricted the access of African American population to their services, thus breaking their right to receive an appropriate healthcare service. In this sense, the power of the Civil Rights Act may be applied for the termination of licensing of the heads of such hospitals and for the mitigation of the problem of racial discrimination in health care institutions. However, one of the modern problems related to discrimination in health care is that different nurses or physicians discriminate against their colleagues or patients on the basis of their skin color, although there is no local policy allowing such attitudes. For instance, Parker, Hunte, and Ohmit (2015) report that one in four African American males experiences discrimination in a health care setting. In such situation, the power of the Civil Rights Act should be applied for designing proactive preventive hospital policies that punish the practice of racial discrimination in hospitals and clinics. Therefore, in the case when there is a lack of institutional policies banning discrimination, the power of federal legislation such as the Civil Rights Act should be used for fixing these gaps.

The Influence of Politics of Health Care

Politics has a significant impact on health care, as well as on other domains of the social and legislative activity as various politicians design healthcare policies and add them to their election programs. Thus, in the case any politic with health care legislation proposals obtains the required legal power, he or she may issue a law that modifies the principles of granting access to health care. More sensitive issues associated with possible health care legislation include medical insurance, the lists of subsidized populations, initiation of statewide health care programs, etc.

One of the examples of the influence of politics on health care is Affordable Care Act. Known as “Obamacare”, this legal initiative is directed toward expanding the potential of health care services in different areas, including mental health services (Lehman, 2015). Although there are people who criticize this policy, others claim that it has a positive effect on specific spheres related to healthcare discrimination. For instance, Affordable Care Act increased the protection of patients with substance abuse and mental health issues, as well as enables the states to expand their medical programs (Lehman, 2015). Thus, a concrete legal decision by a politician and a former US President Barak Obama has improved the specific health care outcomes in patients with mental health illnesses and other individuals who depend on different health care services. Therefore, the analyzed example demonstrates that politics directly affects health care, especially in the cases when politicians fulfill their election programs. At the same time, the strength of the Civil Rights Act is that it is a legal initiative that declares the absence of discrimination at the highest constitutional level.

The Role and Impact of Regulatory Agencies on Health Care Policing

Due to the fact that the Civil Rights Act is a legal act designed and adopted at the highest level, it cannot be affected by any regulatory agency of the governmental or non-governmental origin. The adoption of the Civil Rights Act is a significant event in the US history as this act has ensured the right of the African American population as well as the citizens of other ethnicities, religions, and others, to have equal access to different services. For these reasons, governmental and non-governmental agencies at different levels are the subjects of the impact of this act as it regulates their actions in respect to the citizens of different origins and social backgrounds.

The US courts may refer to the guidelines of the Civil Rights Act to review the different health care institutions’ adherence to them. Similarly, international human rights organizations may also appeal to it when issuing claims against specific hospitals, clinics, or health care practitioners who discriminate against their patients. One of the examples of the application of the power of the Civil Rights Act is the analysis of the level of access to health care services in transgender populations. For instance, Bradford, Reisner, Honnold, and Xavier (2013) claim that the transgender population of the state of Virginia faces grave discrimination in health care, housing, and employment. Therefore, human rights organizations, as well as the government or Congress, should refer to the Civil Rights Act and punish the clinics that practice discrimination in health care and other civil domains. Consequently, the availability of the Civil Rights Act makes it easier for different regulatory agencies to make and rationalize their judgments regarding the legal validity of different practices in the health care sector.

The Impact of Legislative Policy on Resource Allocation in Health Care

The availability of the Civil Rights Act allows different stakeholders to regulate the aspects of resource allocation in the health care sphere in regard to the problem of discrimination. In this respect, the features of discrimination may be present in such areas as the allocation of human and material resources. For example, hospitals and clinics may discriminate against their African-American personnel by giving them low-paid positions and restraining the workplace promotion. Similarly, there may be a risk that Latino-American or African-American members of the staff in the hospitals might be given work with biologically hazardous substances without the appropriate level of protection. Another aspect of the problem of resource allocation is that nurses and physicians may restrain the access of African-American patients to different medicines and supplies. However, due to the presence of the Civil Rights Act, the above-mentioned issues are often unlikely to happen. The reason for it is the risk of punishment at local and federal levels, which is why the assumption that the Civil Rights Act regulates the aspects of resource allocation in health care is correct.

The Role of Organizational Stakeholders in Health Care Laws and Regulations

In a way similar to any act, the Civil Rights Act may be the subject of interest for different organizational stakeholders, such as the organizations fighting for the civil rights, the government, and others. The roles of these stakeholders have a wide variety, although they are often limited to the design and application of a legal framework. For instance, Parlapiano and Benzaquen (2017) report that the members of the US Senate discuss the perspectives of the improvement of the Affordable Care Act or its repeal. In the recent debates, the Democrats claimed that the elimination of “Obamacare” act would hurt the most vulnerable citizens of the US whereas Republicans argued that Affordable Care Act is ineffective (Parlapiano and Benzaquen, 2017). Thus, the stakeholders of different legal acts in health care at the highest level have the wider scope of roles, ranging from modification to deletion. Instead, local stakeholders, such as leading nurses, may advocate the implementation of minor changes to different programs associated with the validation of the guidelines of the acts at their workplaces. Therefore, different stakeholders and interest groups are involved in the process of designing the health care laws and regulations at various levels, improving them accordingly.

Conclusion

The analysis of the role and the outcomes of the Civil Rights Act allow stating that this legal initiative has a positive impact on health care due to the fact that it opposes the phenomenon of social, racial, ethnic, and other forms of discrimination. The Civil Rights Act is a significant legal initiative that grants equal access to education, health care services, and housing to different populations in the US. Such effect is possible due to the positive effect of this federal policy on the aspects of medical staff regulation, resource allocation, and assistance to regulatory agencies. The existence of the analyzed act, as well as Affordable Care Act, proves that politics has a significant impact on the aspects of health care in the US as different laws, beneficial or harmful to health care domain, are designed and issued by the leading politicians. Finally, the aspects of design and practical application of different laws such as the Civil Rights Act can be improved if different organizational stakeholders work actively with this aim, improving them with regard to real-life cases in hospitals and clinics of the country.