Why There is No Right to Health Care

Abstract

Abstract The rhetoric of rights dominates discourse about the distribution of health care. Interested parties invoke the right to health care as justification for insisting on expanded access, enriched benefits, and limitless entitlements to special services. Such expansionist attitudes go back at least to the proclamation of the World Health Organization’s Preamble to its Constitution on July 22, 1946, where it declared: Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, political belief, economic or social condition. Moreover, as recently as 1997 the Council of Europe declared in its Preamble to its Convention for Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine: Resolving to take such measures as are necessary to safeguard human dignity and the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual with regard to the application of biology and medicine. Such claims to the existence of pre-existing fundamental and human rights to health care and health benefits have fed the fire of asserting unqualified entitlements to the concern and care of others. Ordinary people, and medical-care professionals, are called upon to satisfy these claims and feel justifiably uneasy about their failure to pitch in adequately to alleviate the suffering of those in need of various forms of health care-medications, rehabilitative services, long-term care for the disabled, nutritional supplements, prosthetics, and so on. If there were a fundamental right to health care such unease would be fully justified.