At Least You (Should) Have Your Health: Implementing the Right to Health Through the Capability Approach

Michael R. Ulrich, University of Maryland - Baltimore

Abstract

The United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, yet health indicators illustrate it is far from the healthiest. This paper argues that improving the country’s health requires us to shift our focus from viewing health as an individual problem to examining potential solutions that are concerned with the public’s health. Once we make this shift, it becomes apparent that we must attend to discrepancies in social determinants of health, such as income, education, and job status, which affect the social gradient of health. These social determinants, which are at the crux of good health, are essential to exercising basic capabilities. After analyzing approaches offered by Aristotle, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Jennifer Prah Ruger, I conclude that the capability approach implements the right to health by suggesting current efforts to address the social determinants of health must be improved upon to actually provide the health outcomes necessary for one to exercise the rights of citizenship the government is supposedly providing and protecting. Through the use of partial ordering and incompletely theorized agreements, the capability approach makes clear how changes can be made to ensure that not only do U.S. citizens have the right to life, liberty, and property, but that they have the capability to actually achieve these rights and the life they choose.