Rights Based Approaches to Public Health Systems

This presentation analyzes the role of human rights in structuring equity-based public health systems, including the shared social, environmental, and structural systems whose primary purpose is to promote, restore, or maintain health (e.g., clean water and air, food, shelter, energy, sanitation, education, employment, wealth, health infrastructures, social stability, and security from violence and discrimination). In reviewing the incorporation of these determinants of health in previous health care reform efforts—in US proposals and successful national public health systems throughout the world—this research outlines the structural determinants of health amenable to amelioration through national policy reform. Given the importance of these underlying determinants of health in contemporary international legal discourse, the chapter concludes by assessing the current health care reform debate, proposing a rights-based primary health care system that encompasses those structural determinants bearing the greatest impact on the realization of the right to health.