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Relation of the "Right to Health
Care" to being a functional democracy.
"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman".
- - Dr. Martin Luther King
National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Chicago, March
25, 1966.
Dr. King is unquestionably recognized as the foremost civil rights leader in
the USA during the modern era. And in this short quote from that March day
in 1966 we see that Dr. King fully recognized the centrality and importance of
health care justice to society.
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Not the denial of the right to vote, or the right to
eat at any lunch counter, or to ride in the front of the bus, or to attend any
school - but the lack of access to health care that is the greatest injustice in
our society. Simply, it denies an individual the full expression of self
and ability to make use of any other granted right, or privilege.
And its not just Dr. King who in the modern era has recognized the priority of
justice in access to health care.
Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final
sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are
not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the
sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.
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President Dwight Eisenhower, and World War II hero
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Does humanity worldwide, and within each nation
have a right to see their riches and resources go first toward fulfilling the
basic human necessities of food, shelter from the cold and the basics of health
care which their nation can afford? Are
we doing all we can to limit the expenditure on weapons, armies and destruction?
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Is it moral to argue about what life-saving drugs
we can afford to make available to the working families of our own nation and
the elderly who
have worked whole lives away? And
to entertain such arguments even when these people will die without them?
Why don't we give equal scrutiny and public comment on what a reasonable
military budget would be? What are
our goals as a nation in this respect? How
do we expect to impress any allies or potential allies that we hold human life
to be precious? How are we to be
taken seriously as the promoters of peace and justice?
New York state
has recognized the connection between being a functioning democracy and having
universal access to health care. Article 15 Secn 290 of that state
constitution specifies:
The
legislature hereby finds and declares that the state has the responsibility to
act to assure that every individual within this state is afforded an equal
opportunity to enjoy a full and productive life and that the failure to provide
such equal opportunity, whether because of discrimination, prejudice,
intolerance or inadequate education, training, housing or health care not only
threatens the rights and proper privileges of its inhabitants but menaces the
institutions and foundation of a free democratic state and threatens the peace,
order, health, safety and general welfare of the state and its inhabitants.
Read at their website.
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