The Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health: Public Health's Opportunity to Reframe a Human Rights Debate in the United States

Abstract

A right to health is not recognized in the United States Constitution. This article examines the right to health and to health care in the U.S. in terms of expert definitions of health, international human rights instruments, U.S. individualism, the U.S. Constitution, and the impact of stigmatization on health status as a violation of dignity. It argues that establishing a right to health care is a necessary but insufficient condition to protect health. A historically rooted ethos of individualism, in combination with a dominant biomedical paradigm of disease causation, underlies the resistance of the private and public sectors to the concept of health as a human right. Emerging public health knowledge about social causes of disease provides a valuable locus of intervention from which a coalition of public health and human rights advocates can advance the debate and build political will for government action.