Health care access and quality: Federal policy to advance racial, ethnic, and tribal health equity

As described throughout this report, racial, ethnic, and tribal health inequities are created and sustained by factors both inside and outside of the health care system. However, health is strongly tied to the health care system—a healthy population requires access to high-quality, comprehensive, affordable, timely, respectful, and culturally appropriate health care. The health care system serves as an important setting for delivery of care and treatment, individual- and population-level prevention and health improvement interventions, and clinical research and as an important source of data needed to measure health outcomes and health inequities. Some health inequities are created and sustained in the health care system—these are often referred to as “health care inequities,” due to their direct tie to the health care system, as distinguished from “health inequities,” which describe the outcomes related to factors both in and outside the system. This distinction becomes important when focusing on the federal health care policies that contribute to health and health care inequities to identify policy-level intervention points. (author introduction)