Is healthcare a basic human right? That’s a question that was posed to an ethics class that my wife’s cousin is taking. I rather think that’s the wrong question for most of us to be considering. It’s a question designed to create division. If you have any opinion on healthcare or any other subject that’s currently a hot political topic a question in a form like this going to get a rise out of you. That’s probably the reason it was picked for a topic for debate. For those of us not in that ethics class, I think we should be considering this topic from a slightly different angle.
Let’s consider this. Where does healthcare fit into Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Just to refresh your memory, the needs are, starting from the most basic, Physiological, Safety, Love/belonging, Esteem, Self-actualization. These are usually presented as a triangle with Physiological needs at the base and Self-actualization at the apex. Physiological needs include things like breathing, food, water, sex, and sleep. Safety needs include things like employment, resources, morality, the family, health, and so forth. See the Wikipedia article for more details on the additional levels above the two base levels. The theory is that until you have satisfied the base needs, you can’t move on to satisfy the needs more toward the apex.
Health is part of the 2nd most basic level -- safety. If we are to accept the oft-referenced Maslow, we see that if you don’t have your health, you can’t make it up to working on the higher needs of the hierarchy. I’m not so sure it’s that black and white in practice, but it seems likely that the more of your lower needs that remain unmet, the less attention you’re going to pay to the higher needs.
How far back does healthcare go? Certainly through all through history we find references to various kinds of healthcare providers from medicine men/women to surgeons to physicians. In some early small towns, the barber did the surgeries. I suspect there are much earlier references that I could dig up with a bit of searching (see the Wikipedia article on Medicine, history section). Might it not be that it is really healthcare that is the oldest occupation instead of the usual one so suggested? Surely such a consistent pattern of the existence of some sort of health practitioners reveals the magnitude of the need that we have for healthcare.
Regardless of if we call this a “basic need”, it is certainly an “important need.” Should we not as moral individuals be concerned as to the important needs of our fellows? Should we not be doing what we can to see that all have their important needs met. Shouldn’t everyone have clean air to breath, clean water to drink, and healthy food to eat? Shouldn’t everyone have a safe place to sleep? We can probably agree on most of these, can we not? I propose to you that healthcare is right in there with the rest of these and maybe also having meaningful employment (but that’s another blog post). I propose that the moral thing to do is to put healthcare on our list of things that we want for everyone and do what we can to make sure everybody gets some.
So what then is the question? It’s not if. It’s not when. It’s what and how. What level of health care can we guarantee to everyone and how can we provide it efficiently? This is what our current struggle is about and what we should rationally and deliberately be discussing.
