Health Care: Right or Privilege

Health Care: Right or Privilege

Introduction

Health care as a right is accorded recognition, explicitly and/or implicitly, in a plethora of international declarations and treaties: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, among others (Sachs, 2008). At the domestic scene, an increasing number of countries are beginning to codify the right to health care, some statutorily and others constitutionally. Legal recognition empowers claimants not only to demand the provision of certain health care benefits but more importantly provides the legal basis for a founded expectation that the benefits will in fact be provided.

Discussion

Having a right to health care is an assurance that in the event of illness, society will rally to the aid of the patient and that access to health care will be dependent on need and not on ability to pay. Yet, codification whether internationally or domestically, despite its importance, has limited impact. It only addresses the question whether there is a right to health care, legally enforceable against the government; it does not provide justification for the existence of the right. This latter concern, whether there ought to be a right to health care (Moskop, 2003), cannot be located in the codes but is nonetheless an important question.

The significance of the question is not restricted to jurisdictions lacking legal recognition of entitlement of its citizens to health care underwritten by the government. Though apparent that the relevance of the discourse is more pronounced in such jurisdictions, there are also compelling reasons for justification of the right even in systems with laws on the book guaranteeing the right (Pearlman, 2009). In order to be persuasive, proponents of a system that would overhaul the present system which deems provision of health care an individual responsibility, to be purchased and sold, just like any other goods, in favor of a novel system granting individuals the right to demand free medical coverage, need to provide some justificatory reasons for proposing a change in status quo. It is not sufficient, though it is true, simply to assert that the goals are noble or good: it has to be defended dialectically. There must be some moral grounds for justifying a right to health care, otherwise the right risks becoming what has been described as "merely an incoherent rhetorical flourish, which, when fully examined, is unsupported and unsupportable” (Filc, 2007).

Health care advocates need to demonstrate some rationale that would place health care in a class of its own, different from other needs and thus as warranting different consideration. There ought to be defensible reasons justifying treating health care needs differently, regardless of whether health care is considered a right or on the threshold of becoming one or for that matter, even if not in the horizon at all. For legal recognition does nothing to abate the debate on the ...