OpenForum – a blog by the Health and Human Rights community

Six months into the administration of the United States’ first black president, the right-wing fringe has reclaimed the center of attention in US domestic politics, propelled by industry money and media interests. Health care reform happens to be the issue at stake, but any other issue would have served the purpose, as long as it guaranteed media coverage for right-wing fear-mongering and promoted the ongoing reframing of popular values (choice, security, people’s control) — mastered in the 1990s by Newt Gingrich — into Republican campaign slogans, spiked with racist undertones for good measure. In this context and to a backdrop of news about the return of militias — which kept a suspiciously low profile during the years of the Bush administration — I found the prospect of carrying out field research in Montana on the human right to health a little daunting. But reassuringly, Montana’s Human Right to Health Care campaign is run by an organization that is also Montana’s first and foremost expert in monitoring and fighting right-wing extremism: the Montana Human Rights Network.

With my counterpart from the Montana Human Rights Network, I set out this August to conduct focus groups in Lewis and Clark County, western Montana, to explore people’s health needs and their experiences with the local health care system. To our relief, we did not attract town hall size groups ready to vent their engineered hate, but we also did not fully escape the ugly reverberations of Fox News and Talk Radio. Some people with low incomes and very limited access to health care looked with disdain to the perceived health needs of others — particularly to those who had already been “othered” by decades of right-wing ideology (immigrants, the poor) — as an explanation for their own unmet needs. The community spirit of a frontier area sat in uneasy tension with the blaming game promoted on the airwaves from far away.

Yet we also heard plenty of other voices, from the poor to the privileged, who reported barriers to insurance coverage, a shortage of doctors, and a lack of respect for human beings in need, and who  openly welcomed the notion of health care as a human right for all, regardless of ability to pay. Read more

Health care is a universal right, declare health care reform activists in Montana. If we recognize universal care as a right rather than as a private product, the activists contend, Americans across the country could gain fair and equitable care.

Anja Rudiger of the Human Right to Health Program, said that a set of principles should be used to determine whether a system supports health care as a right or if the “profit motive” overshadows the affordability and accessibility of care.  Rudiger has previously written an article for Health and Human Rights demonstrating the use of a “human rights framework, [in which] ethical principles — or “values” — are the premise for action.” This framework, Rudiger asserts, allows activists and policy-makers to re-frame the debate on health care by leveraging,  “theoretical and empirical findings to make a case for re-envisioning health care as both a right and a public good.” Read more