Health Care is a Right, Right?
Is health care a right? The United States remains the only developed country in the world unable to come to agreement on an answer - Atul Gawande

image by: Molly Adams
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Health care is a human right in times of crisis. Why not every day?
Much of the world has settled the matter of whether health care ought to be a human right. The United Nations said so in 1948. The American founders might as well have said it in 1776 when they listed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness among citizens’ unalienable rights, but this vision has not yet been realized, as evidenced by rampant disparities in access to care.
Separating health care from these unalienable rights requires Olympic-level mental gymnastics. Yet every day we find more creative and profitable ways to vault, somersault, and twirl our way out of our mutual (and, according to our founders, creator-endowed) responsibility to ensure that every American is guaranteed…
Resources
Health Is A Human Right
I believe in health care as a human right. I've worked as a doctor in many places, and I've seen where to be poor means to be bereft of rights.
Health care is an essential human right – and so is a proper diagnosis
Health is a human right. And yet, the sad reality is that, 40 years after the Alma Ata declaration pledging “Health For All,” half the world is still without access to essential health-care services.
Is Health Care a Right?
It’s a question that divides Americans, including those from my home town. But it’s possible to find common ground.
What It Means for Health Care to Be a Human Right
More than half the world’s countries have pledged to protect their citizens’ right to health care, through either national laws or international human-rights agreements. The United States is not one of them, although demands for universal health care and Medicare for All have been animating issues
Why Healthcare Needs A Civil Rights-Style Movement
There will come a time in the not too distant future when we look back at the healthcare system as it is today with shame and embarrassment. We’ll wonder how anyone got the right kind of care and rue the policy and clinical decisions that have made oursystem unaffordable, inaccessible, wasteful, and inferior to our peer nations.
America needs to decide: is health care something we owe our citizens?
This health reform debate, like virtually all the others that have come before it in this country, has failed to confront head-on the most important question in health. As a result, the end result will just be another Band-Aid. The fundamental question that every Congress from Truman’s to Trump’s has refused to answer is this: What is a health care system for?
Americans Now View Health Care as a Right. Republicans Can’t Change That
In 21st-century America, health care is not a privilege or a benefit or an entitlement; it is a human right. And those who attempt to strip insurance from the vulnerable will discover just how unpopular their callous selfishness truly is.
Do Poor People Have a Right to Health Care?
A country’s deepest values are reflected in how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. So as officials consider the future of Medicaid, they must ask themselves: Is this how America is going to be?
Health is a fundamental human right
“The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition”. Almost 70 years after these words were adopted in the Constitution of the World Health Organization, they are more powerful and relevant than ever.
I think health care is a right. I asked an expert to tell me why I'm wrong
The big takeaway from our conversation is that the debate about health care, like nearly all political debates, reduces to a value judgment. Either we value providing adequate care to the most people possible or we value providing ideal care to fewer people in a system that produces more innovation. That’s the fundamental trade-off, and where you come down turns on what you value.
Should All Americans Have the Right (Be Entitled) to Health Care?
The United States is the only nation among the 37 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations that does not have universal health care either in practice or by constitutional right.
Yes, Health Care is a Right -- An Individual Right
What follows is an edited excerpt of my remarks, in which I argue that health care is indeed a right—but not in the way that most progressives think.
Health care is a human right in times of crisis. Why not every day?
Much of the world has settled the matter of whether health care ought to be a human right. The United Nations said so in 1948. The American founders might as well have said it in 1776 when they listed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness among citizens’ unalienable rights, but this vision has not yet been realized, as evidenced by rampant disparities in access to care.

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