Health Care Right

Our journal articles this week focused on the heated debate of health care as a right or a privilege of United States citizens. Although this has always been a topic of discussion, it has held more prevalence in recent years with President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, the first successful step in the direction of making health care a right. Despite the majority of citizens believing health care is something all people should have, the way of going about it – universal health care – is highly questionable to some. As the first article mentioned, the majority of European nations have a type of universal health care. The United States attempted a smaller, less universal system of this when they established Social Security. Social Security only applies to certain members of the population, though. Overall, the United Nations views health care as a right, but four nations, including the United States, does not recognize it as …show more content…
In 2010, the number of uninsured Americans was over 50 million, showing that health care is indeed not treated as a basic human right in the United States. Although Medicare and Medicaid exist, they only cover a small and specifically qualified number of Americans. The highest number of uninsured citizens are those who make $25,000 a year or less – too much to qualify for Medicaid but too little to afford their own health insurance. Access to health care is a moral right, but the question of it being a legal right is debatable. Distributing health care unequally without a doubt questions the moral and ethical sides of the system, but as far as legality goes, it is perfectly fine. This goes back to the “survival of the fittest” mentality spoken about in the first article. Making health care a legal right could turn into overutilization of resources, which could be dissected as meaning more resources are used for the “weak” than the