Health Care a Human Right?

Current debate over the importance of health care is nothing new. Although the Founding Fathers didn’t specifically enumerate health care when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” being healthy enough to enjoy those fundamental human rights is understood.

When FDR died in 1945, he had been drafting a “Second Bill of Rights,” which specified health care among other fundamental rights. His wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, took FDR’s work to the United Nations, where it became the basis for the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including Article 25, the essential right to health. The United States, together with all other nations of the UN, adopted these international standards in 1948.

But U.S. recognition of the universal healthcare right has waned and is not even mentioned in its 2015 human rights report to the U.N., referring instead to “health measures” and insurance, not medical care.

Longtime human rights activist Mary Gerisch wrote in a 2018 American Bar Association article, “This failure to protect the right to health is puzzling. From FDR’s drafting of the Second Bill of Rights to Dwight Eisenhower’s success in passing Medicare, our country’s leaders have attempted to ensure our right to health.

“The crucial and intersectional nature of that right was recognized in the 1960s by Martin Luther King Jr. during the Poor People’s Campaign,” Gerisch wrote. “He affirmed that, ‘Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.’”

— Ted Pease