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Buchanan's Understanding Of Healthcare As A Human Right

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The second constraint offered above involves the idea that equals should be treated equally (Shafer-Landau, 2010, pg. 6). A strong argument for healthcare as a human right emerges from the overwhelming evidence that correlates poverty with the presence of disease and disability in individuals (Annas, 1998 p. 1779) and, vice versa, the effects of poor health on the perpetuation of poverty in individuals and groups (Braveman & Gruskin, 2003, p.539). The language of what constitutes a human right has been recently broadened to include those things that are necessities for an adequate and healthy life, including equalizing factors like education and safety systems like healthcare. The argument being made is that when a citizen cannot provide these …show more content…

This concept is based on three main features. The first of these features involves understanding what the decent minimum means in a society-relative sense, meaning that government provided services in a particular society must depend upon the resources that are already present in that society and what is given to citizens under the umbrella of the right can be adjusted depending on what is accessible by the society (Buchanan, 1984, p. 58). The second feature involves making strides to avoid the excesses of what is known as the strong equal access principle. The strong equal access principle states that everyone has an equal right to the best healthcare available to them and this leads us to consider two options: either set the level of healthcare guaranteed to citizens lower than what is possible or set it as high as is possible. We should avoid the second case, as it would create a drastic strain on resources and would take away from other possible goods and services that could be or are provided outside of healthcare. Therefore we accept the first case, wherein which everyone is supplied a healthcare package that provides them with everything that is necessary to live a reasonably healthy life. If those who are able want to purchase or invest in more than that standard package they will have the opportunity to do so, while everyone will …show more content…

However, this should not deter us from making strides to consider healthcare a political right in our contemporary society, and as such a right that should be extended to all of citizens of the United States. We aim for the ideal of our people being equal but without equal access to healthcare our citizens of a lower socioeconomic class are unhealthy and poor, a cyclical force where one situations feeds into the other. Therefore we must make aims to provide the decent minimum by requiring citizens to purchase a decent minimum that is funded by taxes, employers, and the government. This system would be boosted by the creation of a uniform system of costs, allowing greater access to special services outside of the necessary basic package. The causes and solutions of healthcare are interrelational and the possible solutions that I have presented herein acknowledge these causes and thus aims to properly address

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