A dramatic disconnect between principles and policies has hampered current U.S. health care reform efforts. This became obvious when candidate Obama declared health care to be a right and then proceeded to treat it as a commodity when negotiating with insurance companies a requirement for individuals to buy a commercial health insurance product.

Similarly, early on in the debate the president championed the principle of universality by promising some form of health coverage – if not necessarily health care – for 46 million uninsured people, only to lower the policy goal to 30 million American citizens in his speech before Congress, excluding many immigrants and low-income people. Since then, further policy provisions that restrict access to health coverage for immigrants – documented and undocumented – and reduce affordability for lower-income people have appeared in the health care bill adopted by the Senate Finance Committee.

With people of color already up to three times more likely to be uninsured than white Americans and suffering from unequal health outcomes, it is no surprise that over the past few weeks a new coalition of groups representing people of color has launched an ad campaign for racial equality in health care reform. With this new advocacy push, prominent national organizations such as the NAACP and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) are now framing their intervention in terms of people’s rights.

The coalition’s principles state that “health care is a basic human right, as essential as food and shelter,” thus echoing ongoing human right to health care campaigns by organizations such as Amnesty International USA and its coalition partners. A number of mainstream media outlets covered the launch of this new campaign – most notably Public Radio and WNYC’s The Takeaway, which featured a thoughtful piece aimed at “exploring whether or not affordable health care can be considered a fundamental human right.” However, while the Takeaway reporters seemed prepared to answer in the affirmative, representatives from NAACP and NCLR remained oddly silent on this issue.

That’s because as soon as principles are placed into the realm of policy, they become subjected to pressures created by the dominant political consensus. Translated into policy, the new coalition’s main demands include a so-called public option, steps to eliminate racial disparities, and “complete access and coverage for all legal residents.” The imagery used in their TV ad – people of color denied boarding a bus – emphasizes that the current health care debate should be linked to past civil rights struggles, with a focus on desegregation and formal equality.

Aligning health reform with a civil rights perspective clearly sends a powerful message, but it does come with some definitive drawbacks. Civil rights, rooted in Amendment XIV of the Constitution, do not include non-naturalized immigrants – documented or undocumented. Therefore, while a policy push that narrows health care access to “legal” residents may not conflict with a civil rights approach, it does ignore the human rights principle of universality. Presumably, such a policy is pursued on a purely pragmatic basis, reflecting the dominant tone of the debate, according to which, as stated by a prominent mainstream migration policy organization, “most agree that unauthorized immigrants should not benefit from government spending”.

Yet even on pragmatic grounds, this position is flawed. Provisions put in place to exclude undocumented immigrants from government spending programs, such as citizenship documentation procedures in Medicaid, have been identified as significant barriers to access primarily for African Americans, not immigrants. Those harmful provisions may still find their way into other aspects of health care reform as well. Whenever we pitch the rights of people of color against those of immigrants, we tend to end up with no rights for either group. No civil rights organization can afford to treat undocumented immigrants as illegitimate competitors for public monies or as potential carriers of disease. And no one can legitimately refer to health care as a human right without recognizing all human beings as rights-holders.

There is another reason why it can be problematic to foreground the language of civil rights, rather than human rights, in the health care struggle. Our basic economic and social rights, such as health care, are more explicitly addressed in the international human rights framework than in the U.S. Constitution. In the past, civil rights have been largely interpreted as equal protection of the law – or formal equality – not as substantive rights in the economic sphere. They don’t lend themselves easily to setting standards that could give a specific meaning to such formal equality. If everyone received equally little – for example if no one got on the bus or, for that matter, if no one received health care – citizens could still be formally equal.

That’s why Martin Luther King, Jr., aimed to move from civil rights to human rights, from desegregation and formal equality to economic justice and equity. In his Poor People’s Campaign, Dr. King intended to tackle health care and similar fundamental human needs as economic human rights and to seek justice beyond judicial decisions. A richer vision of justice means that as human rights advocates we can go beyond demanding equal opportunities in relation to whatever reform measures emerge from D.C. and constructively advance a more substantive policy position. Such a position would link the goal of a universal, equitable health system to a collective, accountable public financing mechanism for health care that enables everyone in society to share costs and benefits.

None of this is meant to underestimate that a focus on health disparities in the tradition of civil rights wouldn’t be a huge achievement if adopted by policymakers in charge. The disgrace of persistent racial disparities is neglected in the current debate, so much so that a couple of prominent think tanks recently tried to direct attention to this outrage by sidestepping the moral perspective and putting a monetary value on people’s health. Both the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the Urban Institute released reports on how much money could have been saved in direct medial expenditures by eliminating racial disparities in health care ($229.4 billion for the years 2003-2006 according to the Joint Center). Economic or fiscal arguments are assumed to resonate more in our market-centered debate than rights-based arguments. Fortunately, this pessimism is not shared by the NAACP, which in its 880 Campaign is explicitly mourning the needless deaths of 880,000 black people over a 10 year period, due to a higher mortality rate than white people.

In fact, numerous organizations and networks have pushed for the elimination of racial disparities in health for many years, with little media resonance. Some of them have made effective use of human rights in their efforts; for example, the National Health Equity Coalition emphasized in a letter to incoming president Obama that “in order to address racial and ethnic health disparities, it is important that the right to health is implemented so that available resources are utilized in a manner that supports achievement of the highest attainable standard of health for every individual.” And back in 2007 the US Human Rights Network organized a collective report submission to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which included a chapter on racial disparities in health care. In response, the UN committee asked the US government to address health disparities, in particular by eliminating the obstacles that limit minorities’ access to adequate health care.

Amnesty International USA has given its own commitment to help eliminate health disparities through its human rights principles and petition for health care reform. These principles recognize that a health care system must be both universal and equitable – it must include everyone and eliminate disparities – in order to meet human rights standards. Neither universality nor equity can be compromised for more convenient policy positions. Our society must organize the collective public provision of equal high quality health care for everyone – people of color and all immigrants, poor people and people in rural and inner city locations, women and men. This entails, as recognized in the NAACP’s centennial anniversary statement that an organization like the NAACP should follow Dr. King and “shift its mission from achieving civil rights to attaining human rights for all.”

Anja Rudiger is a Guest Contributor.

Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan was on Democracy Now! this morning discussing her new book, The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights. Watch above or on the DN! site, which also has a transcript.

Irene kicked off a two-week U.S. book tour last night in New York. Come out and see her at an event near you!

This posting is part of our Forced Evictions in Africa Series

A woman sits in the ruins of houses destroyed in the Cambamba neighbourhoods of Luanda, Angola to make room for a luxury housing complex.

Luanda, Angola hosted World Habitat Day last year. UN Habitat’s Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka called upon President dos Santos to allocate 10% of Angola’s oil income to upgrading vital social services such as housing, plumbing, clean water and electricity and praised Angola’s stated commitment toward a slum revitalization program. Approximately 85% of Angolans live in slum conditions surrounding major cities.

In response, President dos Santos stated his government was waging “a sustained war against chaotic urbanization.” I would agree with that analysis. It certainly looks like a battleground when armed forces enter a neighborhood, raze houses, evict families and destroy their homes and belongings. Since 2001, Amnesty International has documented the forcible eviction of more than 10,000 persons from slum dwellings in Angola, often accompanied by violence including police indiscriminately firing their weapons and beating women and children. And the reason why these evictions have occurred? To facilitate urban development projects and the construction of luxury housing.

In April 2009, Angola announced the creation of a special fund to build one million houses over the next four years. That’s great. But three months later in July, three thousand families were forcibly evicted from the Luanda neighborhoods of Iraque and Bagdad, utterly demolishing homes and possessions.

“Armed police, soldiers and presidential guards arrived in both neighbourhoods at 3am on 20 July and ordered people out of their homes before bulldozers began to demolish the houses. The residents stood and watched as their homes were being demolished. Some of those who tried to stop the demolitions were beaten.”

Well, that’s a little awkward Mr. dos Santos. You say you are following up on your campaign commitment to provide housing because you are concerned about social unrest and then you have your government thugs throw families into the street in the middle of the night in winter, beating them up when they try to salvage a portion of their possessions and dignity. Seems like you might want to consider building those houses at a faster pace than the ones you are tearing down.

Help Human Rights Live in Angola. Stand Up Against Forced Evictions in Africa. Take action now.

This posting is part of our Forced Evictions in Africa Series.

A seven-year-old boy cries after the destruction of his family home at Porta Farm, Harare, Zimbabwe, June 2005. © Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi

Seven hundred thousand people. That is the number of people forcibly evicted from their homes and business over a three month period in 2005. This is the equivalent of bulldozing the entire city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Seem incomprehensible? Seem reprehensible? Think something should be done about it?  We think so to.

Between May and July 2005, the government of Zimbabwe orchestrated Operation Murambatsvina; a slum clearance program touted by officials as necessary to decrease rising urban populations by requiring people to return to rural areas. In reality, the purpose was to disperse members of political opposition parties and disrupt their ability to organize. Houses and informal businesses were bulldozed, leaving people with nowhere to live and no way to earn a living.

Currently, thousands of informal traders continue to face forcible eviction as the government targets vendor stalls in Harare for demolition. Unemployment in Zimbabwe remains near 90%. These market stalls provide goods at a price affordable by the populace and generate necessary income for those unable to work in the formal sector. The mayor of Harare defended these actions by claiming the stalls were a health hazard and violated city regulations.

As we continue a week commemorating World Habitat Day, Amnesty International calls upon the government of Zimbabwe to cease the harassment of informal traders, discontinue the egregious practice of forcible evictions which violate Zimbabwe’s obligations under the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and provide restitution to those it has previously displaced. Join Amnesty International in its effort to assure that Human Rights Live Here.

Brima Sheriff, director of the Sierra Leone section, dancing with community in Mapaki ©Amnesty International

Gouri has wrapped up her on-the-ground reporting from Sierra Leone — but the Amnesty International caravan is still campaigning for the right to maternal health. Follow Africa campaigner Khairunissa Dhala’s posts on the International Secretariat’s Livewire blog. Today: in the rain in Kabala.

Gouri is in Sierra Leone this week to get a first-hand perspective of how maternal mortality affects the women and families living there. She will be sharing stories throughout her trip as a part of our Maternal Mortality in Sierra Leone series.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Amnesty Secretary General International Irene Khan (C) walks with Paramount chiefs after being named member of a local tribe on September 23, 2009 in Makeni. ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP/Getty Images

Today, we travelled with the caravan to Makeni, in northern Sierra Leone.  The trip from Freetown took us about three hours, and we arrived in Makeni to a festive welcome.  We were greeted by young women in traditional dress doing a traditional dance.  They had painted their faces and wore bushels of leaves on their backsides.  They danced around us and wiped our faces with a cloth (we were sweaty) when we entered town. Then we were escorted by the dancers along with a band and dozens of people in a slow (very slow) parade to the village chief’s headquarters in the center of town.  Once there, the village chief, a tall man, welcomed us and took us into a covered space for a small chat, where he told us how happy he was to have us come to Makeni to talk about maternal health.

The AI delegation split in two because we are a pretty large team.  The team I joined went to the hospital and the other went to meet with local civil society organizations.  We then travelled to the government hospital of Makeni to meet with the hospital staff and to talk with women in the maternity ward there.  This is the home town and district of Ernest Koroma, the current president of Sierra Leone.  The hospital here is similar to the one we saw in Freetown.  The maternity ward has 13 beds, all of which are full, and there is one labor room with only one mattress for women to rest on.  If more than one woman is in labor the others have to rest on the floor.  There is only one doctor who can perform deliveries and conduct surgery and we met with him during our visit.  He said a major problem in the country is the lack of doctors – he tells us there are less than a hundred in the whole country!  There seems to have been a major brain drain during and then after the war here. 

Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan (C) visits a maternity ward at Makeni government hospital.ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP/Getty Images

We met a young woman (who looks to me about 14 years old) who had to be rushed here because she had a retained placenta after giving birth to her little girl.  She delivered the baby at home, as most women do here, despite a new government plan that has stated that all deliveries should be in a clinic or hospital.  The current capacity in the hospitals could never manage that.  The young woman had a dilation and curettage at the hospital and seems to be recovering well.  The doctor and nurses told us that all the services they provide are free and no one has to pay.  But when we visited a private hospital later in the day and spoke to community members, they told us this was not true. 

This afternoon, we had a large event in the center of town with the caravan.  Hundreds of people attended, mostly children who had been brought there by their teachers.  We arrive to the event to smiling faces of little children in bright school uniforms and street clothes.  They scream, “hey, hey, hello” and laugh at us.  We must be quite the spectacle to them with our cameras and video equipment.  They giggle as we pass by, like they‘re in on a joke we will never really understand.  I think of how many of these children have lost their mothers and will never get to know the warm and reassuring stroke of a mother’s hand on their faces like my daughter knows.  The impact of maternal mortality touches them in a way we will never really fully comprehend.  They are left to aunts, grandmothers and friends to be raised. 

At the event, Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty, is made the first ever woman village chief of Bombali, the region we are in.  Irene uses the opportunity to ask the community to consider the role of women and to allow them to have a greater voice in the issues that impact them. 

During her address at the event, Irene asks once again how many people know a woman who has died during child birth or during pregnancy.  Most of the hands in the crowd go up.  It’s sad to see such little arms raised around such a devastating reality.  The fact is that Sierra Leone is not alone in facing this crisis, and it really is a crisis – a human rights crisis.  More than half a million women die every year giving birth.  It’s a global crisis which we are beginning to highlight here in Sierra Leone.  But Amnesty is doing a similar report in Burkina Faso and we will be doing a report in the United States as well.  Even in the richest, most powerful country in the world, the United States, women die during child birth because they cannot afford health care.

Gouri is in Sierra Leone this week to get a first-hand perspective of how maternal mortality affects the women and families living there. She will be sharing stories throughout her trip as a part of our Maternal Mortality in Sierra Leone series.

Sunday, September 20th:

Gouri (R) speaks with Saffitu (L), a woman who recently lost her twins during labor. AFP

I arrive in Sierra Leone Sunday at 3:30 p.m. From the airport there are two ways to get to Freetown, the capital: by boat or by helicopter. We take the ferry along the Atlantic Ocean, which takes about 35 minutes, and we arrive in Freetown. Freetown seems to have grown around itself. Its infrastructure barely seems to be able to handle the demands of the city and its people. We travel by car to the hotel and I’ve never seen as many potholes (craters really) in my life. After I left India, where I was born, I never thought I would say this about another place.

Once at the hotel, we are asked to go to the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital (PCMH), in the center of town, right away. We need to get there before dark because lighting at the hospital is bad and also because travel after sunset is not safe. We arrive at the hospital and after some negotiations the head nurse agrees to let us to visit two of the wards in the hospital.

The first ward we visit is Labor Ward 3, which is for women who have had pre-natal complications that have resulted in c-sections. The hospital is not a happy place. The families of the patients sit on the stairs leading up to the hospital’s entrance. Their faces convey the anxiety and fear that we see more explicitly on the faces of the women in the ward itself. At the entrance to the hospital there is a huge sign that lists the prices of the services provided. We see the signs inside the hospital as well even though the government has said they guarantee free service for those in need.

The inside is dark and seems more like an abandoned building than a hospital. It’s lit with florescent lights but only in some sections. The hallways and lobby area remain dark to conserve light. The nurses look exhausted and resigned to the conditions that surround them. We enter the “ward”, just a section of space separated by curtains from the hallway. It has two rows of about a dozen beds. At one end of the ward there is an old television. It is on and it seems to provide some form of diversion for women who’ve lost their babies or who are in severe pain from giving birth. A mosquito net hangs over each bed, and a small basket or crib sits next to it.

I meet Ester, who had complications during labor and has lost her baby. She’s 35 years old and has no other kids. She’s visibly, and understandably, sad. Her eyes convey her internal struggle to make sense of what has happened as well as to make peace with it. She was brought to the hospital after having a difficult labor. As is the case with most of the women here, Ester came to the hospital as a last resort. One, because it’s expensive and very few have the means to pay for it and two, because the community does not seem to trust the quality of service provided. Women are brought here only if something has gone terribly wrong and there is no other option.

We hear of the fees the women are asked to pay before any services are provided. These fees are even higher than the signs inside and outside of the hospital indicate. The health care providers seem to charge based on their assessment of the patients’ ability to pay. One of their aims is apparently to recover costs of medicine and equipment that they pay for themselves, upfront, and then recoup from patients. This leaves women and their families left to negotiate prices for medical care at one of the most vulnerable times in their lives.

A woman discusses her difficult delivery while allowing Gouri to hold her child. AFP

Across from Ester is another woman who is holding her newborn. As I approach her, she lifts her baby towards me and quickly puts him in my arms. I was surprised, not expecting to hold a newborn. After all, if I was in a U.S. labor ward, I’d be peering at the little one behind a solid glass wall to ensure that the baby wouldn’t catch any germs. The baby boy, who is wrapped in a little blue jumper and a matching cap that make him look like he’s got bunny ears, is named David. David has a face that is perfectly formed, unlike most newborns, whose faces look like those of little old men. David has a perfect nose and full lips. His eyes are closed and he sleeps peacefully in my arms. I talk with his mom and she speaks of her difficult delivery. She won’t talk about details of what brought her here to the hospital. She only says she’s waiting for her milk to come in so she can feed David. She’s clearly been through a great deal in the labor and is visibly weak.

Before I leave the ward, another woman asks to speak to me. Her name is Saffitu. She was pregnant with twins. As she went into labor it became clear that she needed to get to the hospital. Most “normal” births in Sierra Leone are performed by traditional birthing assistants (TBAs) who are either elderly women in the community or the first wife of the husband. TBAs are not trained and do not receive any government aid or supplies. They are left to their own devices and their own practices in helping the vast majority of women in Sierra Leone give birth.

Saffitu tells me both her babies died during birth. One of the twins was breached and the other baby was stuck behind it. She says her heart is in pain because she’s grown attached to them. She says “You see, I could feel them move inside me. I knew and loved them. They are not here.” I struggle to find words to console her. I have none. I can only think to ask if she has other children. She says yes. She has a 5 year old boy at home. She’s been in the hospital for 17 days and she is missing him. I tell her (and her husband outside) that she needs to take care of herself so she can be there for him. She holds my hand and squeezes tight. She’s heard about why we’ve come to talk to the women in the ward. Her squeeze affirms she wants her story told so someone else can avoid living it.

PCMH is considered the best hospital in the country. It’s one of a handful of hospitals in the country that has a maternity ward. This is what the women of Sierra Leone have to count on. In Sierra Leone, one in eight women dies during child birth or pregnancy. That’s one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world.

On Tuesday, September 22, Amnesty will launch a report on maternal mortality in Sierra Leone that documents the struggle of mothers who are dying. Together with this report, we’re launching a five-year campaign to pressure the government and donor countries to make maternal mortality a priority.

In a way, the women I met at PCMH are lucky. They at least are alive.

Prime Minister Tsvangirai (left) and President Mugabe

Last week Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement (GPA) turned one year old. The GPA was negotiated as a political compromise following the violence and contested elections of March-June 2008. And how did the proud parents (the Southern African Development Community, or SADC, which brokered and now guarantees the agreement) and family members (President Mugabe of ZANU-PF, Prime Minister Tsvangirai of MDC-T and Deputy Prime Minister Mutambara of MDC-M) celebrate this milestone? Well, they didn’t. But since every birthday should be commemorated, here’s my retrospective on the year. In haiku.

Mugabe no sign
Gono, Tomana stay on
No rule of law yet

Abuse rise, fall, rise
WOZA beat, arrest
NGOs out, in, threatened

Cholera kills quick
Doctors, teachers strike two times
Still not enough food

Mugabe birthday
MDC turns 10, remain in GNU?
Press opens slightly

Bank, “yes, stole money”
Bank pays money back in poo
Zim struggles for aid

Inflation down, good
Can’t get dollars for food, bad
Unemployment same

Tribunal withdraw
Diamonds, companies stolen
Parliament new vote

Constitution 2010?
Zim turns 30 in 2010, big party?
Growing pains to come

(Originally posted on Huffington post.)

Though Alyce Driver worked three jobs, none of them provided health insurance. Regular teeth cleaning and yearly physicals for her five children were a luxury she could not afford. One day her twelve-year-old son Deamonte complained of a headache. Seven weeks later, Deamonte was dead.

The diagnosis? An abscessed tooth.

While death from tooth decay may have been common in the middle ages, this was 2007.

And while one certainly still hears of such things in some of the more underserved areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America, this was in the capital of the richest country on earth.

Deamonte’s story and those of thousands like him who die every year from preventable disease in the United States underscores what’s wrong with the current health care debate. We should be concerned – appalled – that this can happen in our country. But instead of asking ourselves how to right this wrong, we seem to have let the health care debate become about anything but health care.

This country’s founders believed that every human being was endowed with certain inalienable rights – the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the last century, the global community, led by the efforts of the United States and individuals like Eleanor Roosevelt, spelled those rights out. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including… medical care….”

Health care is a human right. Like freedom from torture and ill treatment, equality before the law, and education, health care is something that all of us are entitled to by virtue of being human.

But one would never know that by following the headlines in today’s health care debate. We are preoccupied with questions of cost when it comes to universal coverage, but not when it comes to asking critical questions about an industry that maximizes its profits by denying care. Few are asking the most fundamental question: How can our health care system be overhauled so that it fulfills the human right to health care?

Answering this question is a moral imperative, one that requires us to prioritize principles such as universality, equity and accountability. Americans don’t argue that our elections or judicial system are un-American or negotiable because these processes require government involvement and investment to ensure that they function properly and are accessible to all. And while those seeking to undermine reform rally around cries of “government-run medicine,” our nation’s experience shows such slogans to be both inaccurate and misleading. Publicly-financed health care already exists in Medicare; publicly-operated health care is provided through the VA (with some of the highest patient satisfaction ratings among all health care delivered in the United States); and the postal service, schools, police departments, and fire departments are all “government-run” – and we wouldn’t want to do without them.

America needs a health care system that is equitable and fair. Too many of us suffer from disparities in accessibility and quality of care. For example, there is less than one doctor for every one thousand residents in Appalachia, and black women are more than three times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as white women. And even for those who have insurance coverage, studies show that we may be just a medical crisis away from financial ruin. These types of imbalances are contrary to the American ideals of equality and fairness, which demand a health care system that does not discriminate against those who need it most.

The human right to health care requires that government be accountable for fulfilling that right. Health care is a public good, not a commodity and a healthy society benefits all of us. The government has a duty to ensure that the right to health care is being met; it does not have an obligation to provide private sector insurers and middlemen with increasing profits, as the current Wall Street driven model dictates. Through public financing and administration of health care we can minimize the profit incentives to deny care and instead guarantee access to quality care for all.

In his latest weekly address, President Obama recognized that health care is a “core ethical and moral obligation” in a move that may signal a shift in the administration’s messaging back to core human rights principles. Unfortunately, even the best of the health care plans on the table in Congress falls short of this lofty rhetoric. Low-income people would still have to pay up to 12% of their income for private insurance premiums, plus deductibles and co-pays. Middle-income families would get no support at all, yet not buying an insurance policy would be against the law. And millions of people would still be uninsured.

We – and our elected leaders – can do better. We live in a broken system, one where a fatal toothache serves as a dire reminder of how too many Americans not only lack insurance, but lack comprehensive coverage that provides easily-accessible and quality health care. Regulation and tinkering would no doubt make some marginal improvements to our failed system, but we don’t need tinkering. We need a game changer. We need a publicly run, publicly accountable, Medicare-like plan that would put the power back in the hands of those whose human rights and very lives are at stake – people like Deamonte Driver.

Riffing off of the news that President Obama is adding a moral component to his (heretofore mostly economic) pitch for health care reform, Desiree Evans, of the Institute for Southern Studies, writes:

Finding fresh ways to talk about socio-economic issues is not new in the health care advocacy community. Even as the Obama administration searches for a new way to pitch their proposed health reform, human rights groups and grassroots social justice networks have already been hard at work trying to shift the language and the thinking surrounding health care in the United States. They are using an oft-overlooked notion in the United States: “human rights.”

Desiree doesn’t explicitly answer the question in the title of her post — in reframing the health care debate, “is it too late for human rights?” The answer to that question is clear: no, it’s not too late.

Whatever happens with the current round of health care legislation — whether or not a bill passes, and if one does, whether it’s weak, strong, or even regressive — this is only the beginning of a long, long process in making the U.S. health care system truly universal, equitable and accountable. A bill would have to be implemented, which would take years. Crucial legislative questions will remain at the national, state and local levels. And there will be much more work to be done on absolutely central issues, like true fulfillment of the right to maternal health care in the United States.

But that’s a quibble. It’s a very informative post, on the imperatives of justice in health care reform, the historical roots of the human right to health care, and more — read the whole thing.