Health Rights

Abstract

Health Rights brings together nearly four decades of comparative legal and philosophical discourse regarding the nature, origins, and meaning of rights in the context of health care. Given the age of some of these materials (Fried's work for instance is thirty-five years old) and the pace of change in this area, such a compilation may be open to the criticism that certain work is no longer pertinent. However, the work of Fried, Beauchamp, Faden, Daniels and Buchanan, for example, on the right to health care, right to health, and the right to a decent minimum of health care, have a contemporary resonance. This proposition in the US is borne out by the increasingly acrimonious debate that has surrounded the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010 and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act 2010, part of the reformist agenda of the current Obama administration. Given the main planks of these reforms, of a right to a decent or minimum standard of health care via compulsory insurance, accompanied by organisational, bureaucratic, and professional change, the work of Fried and others has been somewhat prescient and arguably instrumental in engendering such change.