¶ … Right to a Decent Minimum of Health Care by Allen Buchanan
Allen E. Buchanan's "The right to a decent minimum in health care" opens an extensive debate to the limits and issues of using the concept of universal rights of humans in arguing that everyone has the right to have a decent minimum of health care. Problematizing this issue, the author sought to establish that, it is not based on a universal right to "assure" that people will have the right to a decent minimum. Instead, the right to a decent minimum must be argued on four grounds, which Buchanan enumerated and explained in his article.
One of the primary arguments he asserted in the article is the concept of special over universal rights. For him, the right to a decent minimum should be given to people who have had experienced 'injustice' from American society historically, such as the black Americans and...
These people, who have received "unjust treatment by government and other
social institutions," are covered under the special rights, where extraordinary circumstances that happened to them necessitates the need for the right to a decent minimum be implemented and enforced in their case (376).
Secondly, the harm-prevention
argument is similar to the "universal right to health care," although this actually pertains to "equal protection" that people must have in terms of health care. The author posits that with harm-prevention, people will seek to have protection for their health, and consider this act as a moral obligation; thus, the author argues that harm-prevention becoming a moral obligation then results to its standardization "across different racial, ethnic, or geographic groups within the country" (377).
Prudential arguments…
