From Market Competition to Solidarity? Assessing the Prospects of U.S. Health Care Reform Plans from a Human Rights Perspective

by Anja Rudiger, Human Right to Health Collaborative

Published in Health and Human Rights: An International Journal, Harvard School of Public Health, Vol 10, No 1 (2008)

Although the crisis of health care in the United States is widely acknowledged – marked by poor health outcomes, high costs, unequal access, and widening health inequities – its structural underpinnings have not been adequately addressed, and reformers have settled on promoting piecemeal measures to avoid dislocation. The human right to health care offers an analytical and advocacy framework for shifting the health care reform debate from individualist, market-based approaches to the collective responsibility for health care as a public good.

Based on an assessment of the health care reform proposals put forward during the U.S. 2008 presidential primaries, the article argues that the emerging consensus among Democrats and health care advocacy organizations on incremental, market-based reforms ignores issues of equity, participation and accountability. At the same time, the newly popularized concept of shared responsibility enables a concerted push for re-attaching rights to responsibilities and thus asserting the public obligation to protect and provide health care.

The article concludes by introducing the Human Right to Health Collaborative, run by the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) and the National Health Law Program (NHeLP), which seeks to advance the recognition of health care as a human right in the U.S. by supporting grassroots partners and allies in their struggle for universal and equitable health care.

Download a PDF version of the article here.