Unmasking the Human Right to Health; Raising Awareness of Its Ambiguous Interpretations

Unmasking the human right to health; raising awareness of its ambiguous interpretations After fifty years, it can be argued that the right to health lacks one of the vital components of a universal human right, namely enforceability. Often people are disappointed when they acknowledge the poor outcomes of human rights court decisions about access to health care. Many claim that there is a strong tendency to advance moral claims in terms of rights. Moreover, some use human rights (moral) language to pretend to be doing something about people's health status, whereas no legal action is visible. What could be the effect of a normative interpretation of the right to health, concerning access to health services? The human right to health contains both the entitlement to affordable care (normative element) provided by the state and the freedom to control one's body. One needs to recognize the struggle between state sovereignty (you only have an entitlement to health) and personal freedom (control over one's body). Focusing only on the normative interpretation of the human right to health could result in incommensurability. For instance conflicts between World Trade Organization regulations, i.e. TRIPS, and access to affordable care reflect this problem. Furthermore, the ambiguity of the human right to health shades light on the possibility to clog one of its interpretations in order to prevent this right from being effectively implemented. This insight is necessary to assess hypocritical behavior of national health policies. How could the human right to health be interpreted in order to avoid the dangers of a normative interpretation? One could focus on a naturalistic interpretation of the human right to health, as having control over one's own body. This requires an interpretation of a human right to health as an equal choice to obtain one's desired health status.