Who are we?
Healthmongers.org is the first concrete offspring of the Defining the Future of Public Health progressive student summit that was held at the Boston University School of Public Health in April of 2005.
As graduate students in public health-related fields, we believe that health is a human right which must be protected. Public health offers a unique and multidisciplinary approach with which we can advance the health of local and global communities. As students of this varied and diverse profession, we hope to learn the necessary conceptual and analytical tools that will enable us to be effective advocates of public health and responsible members of the scientific community.
The goals of healthmongers.org are to:
- contribute critically and constructively to the online discussion of public health and related political issues
- provide news and perspective on different schools of public health with an eye to helping prospective students of public health choose a program that is a good fit for their interests
- share resources to students of public health who are heading out into the workforce by identifying progressive public health employers
Currently, the authors of healthmongers.org are working towards (or have recently completed) graduate degrees in public health at Boston University, Tufts, the University of Minnesota, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale.
August 8th, 2005 at 1:18 am
Well, if you believe healthcare is a right, then you need to do a little more studying on what a right is and a little less studying on public healthcare.
August 8th, 2005 at 11:03 pm
What an interesting question you bring up johnclif. What are rights? We hear about civil rights, legal rights, human rights, the bill of rights, animal rights, inalienable rights, the right to life and a myriad of other rights every day. At the most simplistic level, rights are justified claims. Legal rights are claims that can be justified legally. Civil rights are claims that can be justified by virtue of being a citizen. They can specify acts which the right-holder can perform as in the right to vote, or acts that others may not perform on the rights holder as seen in the right against unreasonable searches (Bill of Rights Amendment IV). When most people talk about human rights they’re asserting that all people can make certain claims simply because they are human. Human rights claims exist in the realm of morality independent of legal enactment. Philosophers from Socrates to Nietzsche, Locke to Dworkin have pondered rights theory so there’s good reason to be confused. People often find it difficult to accept that human rights are justified moral norms which can be universally applied. If you’re the kind of person who follows a given religion word for word, accepts there is a universal right and wrong or believes fiercely in the writings of Immanuel Kant then universal human rights should be a fairly easy idea for you. Personally, as someone who identifies most closely with moral relativism I’m more comfortable with rights that exist within a social context.
Mongers are perfectly aware that health and basic health care are not legal rights in this country. The belief that access to basic healthcare is a human right stems from each of our individual centers of morality be they religious, ethical or personal. I suspect that most Americans who are faced with someone who’s looking for medical help would find it difficult to deny that care. For example, I was struck by that video we all watched a thousand times of Saddam after being pulled from the spider hole. After all, here was the man most hated by the most powerful nation in the world finally captured. What was the first thing we did with him? It appeared that we gave him a physical exam or “check-up.” He gestured to his ills, appeared to complain about symptoms and some doctor looked down his throat. If we can do that for Saddam why do millions of innocent people worldwide, not to mention citizens of the richest country in the world go without?
-margo plicatus
August 16th, 2005 at 2:31 pm
A need does not create a right. We all need food to live, but does that mean we have a right to food? If so, that ‘right’ implies that food must be made available to us whenever we need it despite our ability to pay for it. And, this leads to the fact that someone else must pay for that food and provide it to us. Therefore, such a right means that someone else is inevitably obligated to expend their time and effort providing us with a right.
Rights are not merely justified claims, or else we are all merely slaves to each other. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is a great slogan for communism (or any of a variety of authoritarian belief systems) but it runs counter to the belief in individual liberty that founded America and started the Great Experiment.
Valid rights (as opposed to made-up ‘rights’) do not impose a cost on others. Valid rights do not collide; the exercise of one’s valid rights never infringe upon anothers’ valid rights. My right to freedom of speech doesn’t obligate others to listen; the only obligation is that others must not prevent me from speaking.
I would agree that you have a right to ACCESS to health care, as a derivative of the right to liberty, in that no one should be prohibited from walking into a doctor’s office to make an appointment or going into a hospital emergency room… but the doctor and the hospital still need to be paid at the end of the day and it is unfair to make others (whether it be doctors or hospitals or the rest of us) involuntarily pay for any particular individual’s medical treatment.
The difference between charity and robbery is compulsion… the pointing of the gun. If I choose to donate to charities to cover health care costs of the indigent, that is my choice. If the government chooses to confiscate part of the results of my labor in the form of taxes (in fact, an irreplaceable part of my lifespan which I will never get back) in order to give those funds to others who lack sufficient funds for private insurance, then I am being robbed. Especially when, if I say “No” I lose my liberty.
Finally, the reason we gave Saddam a checkup after his capture was because, under the Geneva Convention, we bear physical responsibility for any enemy prisoner of war (and Saddam was a POW, unfortunately, because the soldiers who captured him didn’t drop a grenade down into his hidey-hole) who falls into our custody. Of course, under the Geneva Convention we also have the right to summarily execute enemy combatants such as those irregulars captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. I, personally, would like to see us adhere more closely to the Geneva Convention.