Normalizing an American Right to Health

Book excerpt: This book argues against the conventional wisdom that a U.S. right to health is out of reach. It shows that the necessary change is not extraordinary but familiar and that the law has already laid considerable groundwork in ordinary statutes and case law. This descriptive foundation, revealed through the application of well-accepted theories of rights, has simply yet to be either acknowledged as, or relied upon, for rights-building. The book then moves from the descriptive task of showing where a right to health already exists in our legal corpus to the prescriptive goal of showing how we could feasibly and meaningfully expand the right through ordinary policies that are widely used in other domains, including impact assessments and state-sponsored reinsurance. By normalizing American health rights discourse and bringing a right to health, including a right to health care, within the domain of ordinary policy debate, this book arms health advocates for the sharp political contests over health that we face today. Amid the prevailing neoliberal, neo-Lochnerian ideologies that have led us to a dead-end, this book proposes a rival ethic that has been developing right under our noses, one focused on embodied justice, where the priority is squarely on the human and our capacity for suffering and flourishing.