This timely book offers a fresh perspective on how to effectively address the issue of unequal access to healthcare. It analyses the human right to health from the underexplored legal principle of solidarity, proposing a non-commercial understanding of the positive obligations inherent in the right to health.
This book argues against the conventional wisdom that a U.S. right to health is out of reach. It shows that the necessary change is not extraordinary but familiar and that the law has already laid considerable groundwork in ordinary statutes and case law. This descriptive foundation, revealed through the application of well-accepted theories of rights, has simply yet to be either acknowledged as, or relied upon, for rights-building. The book then moves from the descriptive task of showing where a right to health already exists in our legal corpus to the prescriptive goal of showing how we could feasibly and meaningfully expand the right through ordinary policies that are widely used in other domains, including impact assessments and state-sponsored reinsurance. By normalizing American health rights discourse and bringing a right to health, including a right to health care, within the domain of ordinary policy debate, this book arms health advocates for the sharp political contests over health that we face today. Amid the prevailing neoliberal, neo-Lochnerian ideologies that have led us to a dead-end, this book proposes a rival ethic that has been developing right under our noses, one focused on embodied justice, where the priority is squarely on the human and our capacity for suffering and flourishing.
Both developing and developed countries face an increasing mismatch between what patients expect to receive from healthcare and what the public healthcare systems can afford to provide. Where there has been a growing recognition of the entitlement to receive healthcare, the frustrated expectations with regards to the level of provision has led to lawsuits challenging the denial of funding for health treatments by public health systems. This book analyses the impact of courts and litigation on the way health systems set priorities and make rationing decisions. In particular, it focuses on how the judicial protection of the right to healthcare can impact the institutionalization, functioning and centrality of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) for decisions about the funding of treatment. Based on the case study of three jurisdictions – Brazil, Colombia, and England – it shows that courts can be a key driver for the institutionalization of HTA. These case studies show the paradoxes of judicial control, which can promote accountability and impair it, demand administrative competence and undermine bureaucratic capacities. The case studies offer a nuanced and evidence-informed understanding of these paradoxes in the context of health care by showing how the judicial control of priority-setting decisions in health care can be used to require and control an explicit scheme for health technology assessment, but can also limit and circumvent it. It will be essential for those researching Medical Law and Healthcare Policy, Human Rights Law, and Social Rights.
This text is a study of the public/private law divide in the common law tradition. Its starting point is that substantive duties of legality, fairness and rationality are imposed by the common law on bodies discharging public functions, but not always on bodies discharging 'private' functions.
"One purpose of this book is to respond to this shift: to look beyond the more abstract and ideological discussions of the nature of socio-economic rights in order to engage empirically with how such rights have manifested in international practice". -- INTRODUCTION.
Health rights are a common but controversial legal phenomenon. Every country is signatory to a treaty that incorporates health rights, yet existing health rights do not fit easily into the traditional "claim right" model, and questions remain over how to theoretically incorporate health rights into domestic systems. The Pluralist Right to Health Care addresses this incongruity between theory and practice with an account of the right to health care that is both philosophically and practically sound. Utilizing a pluralist framework, Michael Da Silva argues that the right to health care is best understood as a set of claims to related ends: the goods necessary for a dignified existence, procedural fairness in determining what other goods to provide and in the provision of goods, and a functioning health care system. Through philosophical reasoning, analysis of relevant international human rights law, and a close study of the Canadian case, The Pluralist Right to Health Care provides crucial insight into the potential of law and policy to improve health care systems in Canada and beyond.
Human rights are essential to global health, yet rising threats in an increasingly divided world are challenging the progressive evolution of health-related human rights. It is necessary to empower a new generation of scholars, advocates, and practitioners to sustain the global commitment to universal rights in public health. Looking to the next generation to face the struggles ahead, this book provides a detailed understanding of the evolving relationship between global health and human rights, laying a human rights foundation for the advancement of transformative health policies, programs, and practices. International human rights law has been repeatedly shown to advance health and wellbeing - empowering communities and fostering accountability for realizing the highest attainable standard of health. This book provides a compelling examination of international human rights as essential for advancing public health. It demonstrates how human rights strengthens human autonomy and dignity, while placing clear responsibilities on government to safeguard the public's health and safety. Bringing together leading academics in the field of health and human rights, this volume: (1) explains the norms and principles that define the field, (2) examines the methods and tools for implementing human rights to promote health, (3) applies essential human rights to leading public health threats, and (4) analyzes rising human rights challenges in a rapidly globalizing world. This foundational text shows why interdisciplinary scholarship and action are essential for health-related human rights, placing human rights at the center of public health and securing a future of global health with justice.
Governance by regulation – rules propounded and enforced by bureaucracies – is taking a growing share of the sum total of governance. Once thought to be an American phenomenon, it is now a central form of state action in every part of the world, including Europe, Latin America, and Asia, and it is at the core of much international lawmaking. In Comparative Law and Regulation, original contributions by leading scholars in the field focus both on the legal dimension of regulation and on how this dimension operates in those places that have turned to regulation to meet their obligations.
"This volume examines the public/private sector mix in a number of national healthcare systems and their interface with the goals of health equity and quality of healthcare. Moreover, there is a consideration of public accountability. The unique significance of this collection of national studies involving the public/private sector mix of healthcare services and/or finances is that it provides insights into the factors that enhance the public/private sector mix in fulfilling the goals of health equity and the quality of healthcare services as well as an understanding of the circumstances in which elements of the public/private sector mix may be harmful for the achievement of such goals in a variety of national settings. The contributions to this volume provide a variety of perspectives in dealing with these objectives"--