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.

This reflects the other aspect of the national debate, in which the human right to health care has gained enormous traction over recent months. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal serves as a suitable indicator — hardly a week passes in which this organ of US capitalism doesn’t feature a rant against the human right to health care. But we only have to look at the town hall meetings themselves to gauge the growing support for rights-based health care: meetings in which the question of the right to health care was raised, affirmed, or in which it dominated entirely.

Those other voices also give insight into the other, non-clichéd reality of Montana. Montana is a state represented almost exclusively by Democrats, and its progressive history fuels vibrant grassroots activism on health care, from the Network’s Human Right to Health Care campaign to numerous active and committed single payer groups, which recently gave Senator Baucus a run for his hard-earned health industry money. There is no shortage of courageous and innovative initiatives either: a Montana State Senator, Christine Kaufmann, introduced a constitutional amendment for the right to health care, and a local Board of Health — driven by the commitment of a Helena city commissioner whose spirited support for the right to health care can be heard here — recognized health care as a human right and set up a residents’ task force to determine how to ensure universal access to health care locally. Our ongoing field research has been designed to support the pioneering work of this task force, which will continue its work for and with the people of Lewis and Clark County beyond the fanfare of the right-wing media circus.

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.”

Montanans for Health Care, a group involved in this movement, is pushing for congressional hearings.  In particular,  they address their concerns to U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. Senator Baucus is the committee chairman writing the Senate Health Bill, who, along with Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, “has been criticized by progressive groups for bowing to pressure from the health insurance industry lobbyists,” reports Democracy Now, an independent daily TV/radio news program. Earlier this year at a National Health Policy event, Sen. Baucus said, “at this time, in this country, the single-payer [health care system] is not going to get even to first base in the Congress.”  A single-payer health care system is not the only way to achieve the right to health care in the U.S., but is it acceptable that this option is taken off the table from the start?

Amnesty International has echoed the Montana movement and has called on reformers in a petition based on the work of the Health Care is a Human Right Coalition. The Coalition, which includes Amnesty International, National Social and Economic Rights Initiative (NESRI), the National Health Law Program (NHeLP), and the Opportunity Agenda, seeks to promote health care as “a human right, not a commodity.” The Amnesty petition states, “Gap in the health care system should be eliminated so that all communities, rich and poor, have access to comprehensive, quality treatment and services. Publicly financed and administered health care should be expanded as the strongest vehicle for making health care accessible and accountable.” Both this petition and the activism in Montana are critical steps in challenging our current health care systems across the country.

We in the health and human rights community should stand with this reform activism, with the hope that health care can one day soon be seen as right, rather than a privilege.

See also,

Download the Amnesty International Petition here

Video Series: Human Right to Health Care in Montana

Montanans for Single-Payer

Video: NESRI Executive Director Cathy Albisa at Amnesty International USA Annual General Meeting – March 28, 2009 on a panel entitled “Health Care is a Human Right: Realizing the Right to Health in the United States”

NESRI: Fact Sheets and Publications (scroll to Human Right to Health)