Conversation on Health and Human Rights
Physicians for Human Rights has an awesome interview with Helen Potts, PhD who explains in very clear and understandable terms why considering health as a human right is essential and whether it can ever truly resonate with people in the United States. Check it out here.
Money quote:
What does a human right to health mean?
It means that the state has a bundle of obligations to create the social and environmental conditions for a person to reach her highest attainable standard of health. The challenge is to hold the state to account for these obligations. State accountability is so important.
But more than anything else, we have to show that consideration of the right to health can actually make health policy, programs and projects better. When we view policies, programs and projects through the prism of the right to health, they will be more accessible, sustainable, and robust.
The policies, programs and projects will be more meaningful to the people that they are meant to serve.
What are your thoughts to the following question from the article?
“Is it (the right to health) a right to be healthy?
No. The state cannot fully ensure good health, as it is influenced by some factors which are in whole or in part outside the state’s control, such as individual susceptibility to ill health.”
When considering the language used, I often think the right to be healthy is better wording. I envision the right to health to mean the state guarantees a perfect state of well being to all citizens, while the right to be healthy as providing reasonable opportunities to be healthy for all people.
Civil and political rights function in the same way. Americans 18 or older are guaranteed the right to vote. Whether they choose to is their own choice. The state should provide the right to be healthy; whether individuals choose to be healthy is their own choice.
The right to be healthy is not as strong a statement as the right to be healthy, but I think it’s a better description of what the state can provide.
I feel this is a good point to bring up, because it really gets at questioning what we’re really trying to get at when we connect health (or the act of being healthy) to human rights. But I have a slight disagreement with the link you draw between health as a human right and civic rights. Yes, many people in America (a country with probably the most open access to “rights” on the face of this beautiful planet) have the right to CHOOSE to vote. But what do we do about people in rural Haiti stricken with HIV/AIDS who have to decide between spending all of their money on supporting a family or on antiretroviral medications. In that case, do we say the Haitian has the same ability to choose whether or not to “be healthy”? I know that I wouldn’t.
And since we are pulling out quotations left and right, I guess I should add one myself. This reminds me a lot of Paul Farmer’s answer to the noncompliance question in Pathologies of Power:
“Certainly, patients may noncompliant, but how relevant is the notion of compliance in rural Haiti? Doctors may instruct their patients to eat well. But the patients will ‘refuse’ if they have no food. They may be told to sleep in an open room and away from others, and here again they will be ‘noncompliant’ if they do not expand and remodel their miserable huts.”
Good Point,
I think everyone can agree that most Haitians don’t have the right to health (blogmaster edit: “I think everyone can agree that most Haitians aren’t having their right to health realized“). Being able to determine your own health requires a hell of a lot of more support (clean water, health education, etc.) than being able to vote.
I think that the wording of the right to health was adopted because it sounds more authoritative.