By Brianna da Silva Bhatia, Michele Heisler, and Christian De Vos
American health care too often fails to protect the right to health or promote health-related rights. Despite efforts to increase access to health care and to better incentivize high-quality, value-based care, the United States’ health care system remains fragmented, largely profit-based, and predominantly disease-focused rather than prevention-focused.
To design systems and policies that promote the right to health, a holistic and proactive approach is needed, one in which people, institutions, and corporations have a shared responsibility in promoting physical, mental, and social well-being. The Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles), allow us to imagine a new future and help outline a path for how to get there. In this piece, we discuss how the Principles might be applied in a rights-based approach to address some of the core problems in the U.S. health care system.