The US muddle over a child's right to health care

The right to health care.

They have needs, and because they live within a welfare state, these needs confer entitlements--rights--to the resources of people like me. Their needs and their entitlements establish a silent relation between us. As we stand together in line at the post office, while they cash their pension cheques, some tiny portion of my income is transferred into their pockets through the numberless capill...

Creating the Right Sort of Ship to Achieve Integrated Care: A Response to Recent Commentaries

AIDS and the right to health care.

A 1987 New York Times editorial noted that the refusal of physicians and dentists to treat patients infected with the AIDS virus is the most painful symptom produced by the fear of AIDS. 3 An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) echoed this concern. 4 C. Everett Koop, the Surgeon General of the United States, admitted that he is getting more reports of health care...

A Kantian Defense of the Right to Health Care -Draft-

In Kantian political philosophy external freedom, understood as the ability to take up means toward the attainment of ends we have set for ourselves, is secured through the three branches of the republican state. Indeed, the state is necessary for the exercise of this freedom. However, in order to provide a condition consistent with the original contract, further institutions are required; in t...

The right to a decent minimum of health care.

Buchanan examines, and finds inadequate, several philosophical approaches to justifying and specifying the content of a universal right to a decent minimum of health care: utilitarian arguments, Rawlsian ideal contract arguments, and Norman Daniels' equality of opportunity argument. Also rejecting the libertarian hypothesis that there is no right to a decent minimum of care, he contends that t...