A New Year’s Resolution
Following Victor’s lead, I’d like to do some reflecting myself, but on a more personal level. Recently, I’ve been filling out applications for a variety of internships, fellowships, summits, and conferences. They have all asked me the difficult question that often leaves me speechless and pensive for a time. Why?
It’s a difficult question to answer, because it implicitly asks us to convince people of the priority we place on health equity above so many other pressing issues. We tend to focus so much on the discussions we have amongst those of our own kind, celebrating things like the top global health developments in the past decade. But for those who don’t read our blog, those who aren’t members of FACEAIDS or GlobeMed, or those who haven’t heard of PEPFAR, the question still remains: Why should I care?
Since the New Year quickly approaches, I’m making finding my answer to this question my New Year’s resolution. I’ve already started on something based on my recent readings of contemporary philosopher John O’Manique and Horace Mann, the man credited with starting the public education movement in America in the 1830’s.
O’Manique uses common sense to define a right per se:
A right is a claim to something that is needed for the development of an individual human being. Its moral foundation is the virtually universal belief that, since development is good, one ought to develop and have or do what is required to develop. This is the transcendent human articulation of the propensity found in all organisms, to develop.
Many of us in the bidness argue for health as a human right. And, because of this expanded sense of “rights,” I agree. I see access to the basics of health as the condition for human development. Lacks of access to the most basic care, along with access to preventative measures for HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria, keep afflicted populations in the undeveloped world living defenselessly as victims instead of as productive members of our new global society. And thus “global health equity” is a means for allowing people to achieve betterment.
But to me, it is more than a human right; it is a necessary condition for helping people lift themselves out of their poverty. This is where adopting Horace Mann works nicely. In a speech on his inauguration as Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann states plainly that education for the poor can have economic motivations, too:
The greatest of all the arts in political economy is to change a consumer into a producer; and the next greatest is to increase the producing power,—and this to be directly obtained by increasing his intelligence.
Our arguments for better access to care in impoverished areas need not be simply moral; they can be economic.Providing better access to health for the poor in the world’s undeveloped regions is analogous to providing education for the poor in Masachusetts in 1837. It can start the gears which turn stagnation into productivity. A man afflicted with AIDS cannot till what little farmland he has. And if he cannot till, he cannot be expected to grow food for his children. And if they are malnourished, how can they hope to develop their father’s land? The lack of access to health care is the initial step in a vicious cycle.
And so, global health equity is necessary for all the right reasons, ones that I know need expansion and probably warrant discussion. So now I pose the same questions to you: Why global health equity above everything else? Why should I care?
