PHA-Exch> Re: health and human rights

[Claudio Schuftan]

from Gorik <gorik at presr.org>   excerpts

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> If low-income countries cannot provide the minimum essential level of
> healthcare, then the right to health does not exist for the inhabitants of
> low-income countries. This is nothing more than the meaning of 'core
> content' of the right to health.
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> If high-income countries do not have an obligation to provide assistance to
> low-income countries, then low-income countries cannot provide the minimum
> essential level of healthcare to their inhabitants. According to WHO it
> costs at least US$35 per person per year to provide a basic package.
> According to the World Bank, low-income countries (GDP per person per year
> below US$900) can at best have government revenue of 20% of GDP (US$180) and
> allocate 15% of that to health (US$27). There are countries with a GDP per
> person of US$150… Temporary and charitable international assistance does not
> solve the problem: if we're serious about low-income countries having an
> obligation they cannot finance without assistance, then the assistance must
> be an obligation as well.
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> And logically, the only alternative for acknowledging the obligation to
> provide assistance, is admitting that the right to health does not exist for
> the inhabitants of low-income countries.
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> According to the estimates I made for my thesis, low-income countries would
> need about US$30 billion per year. The problem is that this is both a
> collective entitlement (all low-income countries together) and a collective
> duty (all high-income countries together), so nobody can tell which country
> owes what to which other country. To solve that, you need a global
> agreement, to break down the collective duty and the collective entitlement
> into national duties and national entitlements (very similar to the way we
> need a Kyoto agreement to break down the collective obligation to reduce
> greenhouse gasses into national targets). The contributions should be
> mandatory and based on burden-sharing, and low-income countries should have
> some conditional drawing rights.
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