Human rights, civil rights: prescribing disability discrimination prevention in packaging essential health benefits

This article explores rights-based approaches to protecting disabled people against inequities in access to health care services. Understanding health care as a human right, as is found in the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD), fails to provide theoretical machinery for responding to certain pressing challenges. An alternative account, understanding health care as a civil right, proves more promising. This latter approach then is applied to the right to health care under the U.S. Affordable Care Act (ACA), which contains provisions that could be antithetical to, and thus fail to comply with, the nondiscrimination standard of meaningful access to health care benefits.