Healthcare justice and the right to health

The question of whether healthcare is a right or a commodity is not, in most of the world, particularly contested: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the healthcare systems of most high-income countries, treat it as a right. The United States remains the primary outlier — a wealthy country that has organized healthcare as a market and produced outcomes, in terms of life expectancy and financial devastation from illness, that are substantially worse than comparably wealthy systems. The philosophical argument is not complicated: the conditions that make human flourishing possible cannot be available only to those who can pay for them.