Health care as a natural right

Health care is recognized as a right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by the World Health Organization's Declaration on the Rights of Patients. This article demonstrates that this concept of a 'right' to health care draws strong support from leading modern works on natural law and justice and responds to the arguments, both theoretical and practical, put forward against this proposition. It concludes with two warnings: (a) Even in a system where health care is said to be a right, this can be meaningless if the system does not promote basic health, fails to set proper legal and ethical controls or ignores the important individual rights of patients. (b) Our primary commitment must be to those persons who are denied access to health care. To them, talk of patient's individual rights is superfluous. They cannot claim such rights if they are denied the more fundamental right to be a patient.