Quality health care refers to the services that ensure that healthy people continue to remain healthy, curing entirely acute diseases, and those suffering from chronic diseases live a long fruitful life. Quality care has to ensure that the three kinds of people receive adequate and prompt care. This process faces challenges that prevent it from achieving its maximum potential. One of the challenges is poor access to these services (McLaughlin, 2006).

Access to quality care refers to the ability of individuals to access medical services when they need it. It entails two different but related components, that is, availability of facilities that provide health care around where people live and the aptitude of people paying up for the services. Inability to pay is a financial barrier to healthcare. Medical care is expensive for many individuals in the country. It is for this reason that the government came up with medical insurance to subsidizes this fee. It works in a manner that ensures that most of that underemployment is insured. This insurance extends to their family members, as well. However, fractions of people in the country are underemployment (Elizabeth & Maulik, 2008).

The unemployed and self-employed do not have access to insurance. They pay the entire bill themselves, which is rather expensive. In addition to this, these people do not qualify to be under public programs including Medicaid and Medicare since they are unemployed. Medicaid and Medicare help in subsidizing the cost of health care services to be incurred by its members. An alternative is to purchase the individual private coverage, which goes for a rather high premium. The number of people without health insurance continues to rise steadily due to many factors. A major factor is the rise of insurance cost (William & Julie, 2011).