Blog

Roundtable

• Noga Arikha

  The Right to Health

  Tags:

  health care,

  human rights,

  insurance,

  Noga Arikha,

  World Health Organization

  Tweet

  The human animal needs its doctors. Our societies created healers whose job is to cure the ailing, natural body. Such healers may be priests, witches, astrologers. Or they may be secular physicians, endowed with knowledge of anatomy and physiology, reliant on authoritative texts, such as the Greek Hippocratic Corpus in the West, the Caraka and Susruta compendia in India, the Nei Ching in China.

  Access to authoritative health care of this sort was not universal. In China, elites alone consulted the secular doctors. In India, medical knowledge was entwined with spiritual exercises not available to all. And in the West, trained doctors could be costly. Still, the common people in most cultures could resort to “folk” practitioners, some of whom happened to be versed in precious herbal knowledge and the like; and, moreover, charitable establishments, confraternities, religious orders have always provided voluntary care to the indigent.

  In 1946, the World Health Organization declared in its Constitution that, “The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every being.” The notion of universal health care is thus a recent, explicit extension of the not-much-older concept of human rights: “every being”--everyone, irrespective of social class or income level--has the right to be guaranteed good health. The Hippocratic doctors, in ancient Greece, practiced according to an oath that protected the individual patients’ well-being. Institutional medicine has changed since then in one fundamental respect: it has turned health care into a collective enterprise, allowing for the (usually) better treatment of more patients, within complex, large institutions, with the use of complex technologies, and on the basis of international scientific research. In those countries where medicine is so institutionalized, and where political institutions embrace the notion of human rights, there is no ideological or practical impediment to providing decent health care to everyone. In those countries, the right to health is as self-evident as is the universal access to clean running water (also a human right for the WHO). Economics may grind, bureaucracies weigh, corruption win, infrastructure crumble. But at least the provision of decent health care for everyone remains a goal.

  The history of this right is recent but swift-paced. In France, nineteenth-century mutuelles gave birth in 1945 to the Sécurité sociale, which now ensures universally subsidized health care; Italy instituted social medicine in the late nineteenth century and today ensures completely free care to all; ditto in the UK, where the National Health Service was founded in 1948, although David Lloyd George introduced compulsory health insurance to low earners in 1911 after visiting Germany, where Bismarck had made health insurance compulsory in 1883. Most other European countries offer versions of social security of this sort, as do, in various formats, New Zealand, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Kenya, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, India, and Taiwan, amongst others. In all those places, even where access--to health or water--is hard to achieve, the right to it is no more in question than is the hard-won, epochal, and essential doctrine of human rights.

  But not in the United States: when our messy animal bodies ail here, our rights as humans disappear, trumped by the rights of capital.
  

  September 2, 2009
  • Email /
  • Print /
  • Comment now