I guess we’re getting into SMP territory, so I’m gonna go full hypothetical, because that’s really where our only differences lie. After all, if we’re going to try to define “rights”, this is where we were going to end up anyway.
Let’s say the US enacts some sort of law banning all medical treatments that were discovered after 1990. No one has any access to them – rich or poor. Now in the hypothetical scenario, US institutes medicare for all. So every citizen has access to this equally shitty health care. Many people will die or suffer because treatments that exist are no longer allowed but exist everywhere else in the world. Also because of COVID, Americans aren’t allowed to travel anywhere else.
So now everyone has equal access to health care and it’s a right. All good?
How are you going to ensure that? In a non COVID world without travel restrictions, someone really wealthy can get on their private jet and get whatever health care they want tomorrow, while the rest of you Canadians have to wait in line.
If you think of human rights as “Very Good Ideas”, and that we should write them down, and get as many nations on board with them as we can, then absolutely healthcare should be a human right.
What’s somewhat annoying though is when people act like the rights somehow existed prior to writing them down, in that case they’re taking on some sort of mystical quality like the Ten Commandments.
I’m not saying write it into the constitution. Hell, the UK doesn’t have a constitution and they clearly treat healthcare as a human right.
Yet, people seem content to not do so. It’s likely why there’s a life expectancy gap of 14.4 years between the richest and poorest in America. In countries with a more robust system like Germany, it’s slightly above 5 years.
Your “argument” if we can even call it that, is at best a tautology.
You’re saying that any country that provides UHC, treats it as a human right (apparently it doesn’t matter if they have explicitly stated that it isn’t). Therefore, any country that doesn’t treat it as a human right, will not provide it. Because if they did, then it automatically means they are treating it as a human right.
Countries and people that classify healthcare as a human right view it as a moral imperative to provide it to all even if it requires a tax hike or isn’t super-profitable.
Americans goes MUH TAXES and thus it never happens. Life expectancy continues to decline and people btich about having to pay crazy healthcare costs when they could get UHC instead.
That’s the frustrating thing about formal rights. Canada’s rights explicitly provide that Canadians can enter and leave Canada if they so choose. So denying them HC in Costa Rica would be a violation of their actual rights.
A thorny issue with granting formal rights is that, at least in the Canadian context, they can often be wielded by the wealthy as a tool against progressive policy. Be careful what you wish for.
If you think of human rights as things like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, assembly, due process, the right to benefit from your labor, and so on, then I don’t think healthcare fits in with those.
I agree with this. At the level of laws and courts, there are meaningful distinctions to be drawn between rights and societal norms and government policies and values. At the rhetorical level these things can all be casually blended into a general belief that “people” “deserve” “things”. When Canadian politicians or activists say Canadians have a right to get the health care they need, they seldom mean that out Constitution/Charter should be amended. They just mean the provincial Ministry of Health should allocate more resources differently at the policy level.
I mean sure, there can be situations where if access to healthcare was a human right, then applications of that right could lead to situations that result in an overall decline in quality of care. In fact I believe a lot of applications of UHC result in this scenario of a lower standard of care(although not that drastic) because resources are being stretched more thinly. I don’t think it’s really necessary to go too far into this though and I don’t think it’s an argument against healthcare as a right.
Healthcare is more of right than something like religion as 100% of people need healthcare at many points in their life. After food and water it’s the next most fundamental need for all people.
I just don’t see the point in tacking various social welfare programs on with Lockean natural rights. They’re very different: housing for the poor and healthcare for everyone are things that the government gives to everyone, while natural rights are things that the government can’t deprive any individual of. So in that framework a right to healthcare would logically be that the government can’t interfere with someone seeking medical treatment, not that the government has to provide that treatment to that individual.
But if the government should provide these entitlements is a separate question, and saying “no healthcare isn’t a right” doesn’t imply that the government shouldn’t provide healthcare. Or housing, or unemployment insurance, or whatever.