Essay On Social Justice

In a truly just society, justice would lead to a heightening of the vulnerable patients making their health perhaps the only position of their life that is no longer vulnerable. Until social justice is applied to our geopolitical stage, gender and ethnicity differences will continue to limit work opportunities and fair pay. But, if we were to get the health component right, their health would not be a compounding factor in their vulnerability. Instead, good health can help to establish one’s capabilities to explore opportunities and better their lives. Whether it is Nussbaum’s (2000) exhaustive list of 10 essential capabilities or liberalism’s primary good (Almgren, 2013, p. 35), good health and well-being enables a person to fulfill their

The just delivery of health care falls into a pattern of rights. Medicaid and the US political view aside, the right to health care is a basic human right whose only requirement is that someone be a human being regardless of their gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic class. That is, the right is a non-relational right that every human needs irrespective of differences in individual goals (Lomasky, 1981). As a positive right, it is the obligation of others to provide for one’s health needs, within limits. In satisfying the right to health care, society contributes toward the fulfillment of the right for the individual. In Medicaid for example, the right is supported through taxation, among other mechanisms and delivered by a

Using two dominant theories, Rawlsian Liberalism, and Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, we identify a weakness when the theories are applied with the assumption that a human right is by virtue of being human (Powers & Faden, 2006). Both theories have some means of acknowledging health care as a right. Rawl’s suggests that health care may be a “primary good”, or a benefit that is part of a just society, on which Daniels outlines “six health needs” including social determinants (Almgren, 2013, pp. 35-36). Nussbaum (2000) specifically outlines 10 capabilities that expand upon categories of health and well-being. The divergence of our universal right is in both theories assumed that a person should be a citizen or have some capacity to contribute to society. Rawlsian liberalism goes as far as to outline that a “free and equal individual”, or one who has a right to primary goods, requires that the person can engage in social and political citizenship, which includes voting (Almgren, 2013, p. 17). Undocumented immigrants possess no such rights, so they would have no claim to health care as Rawl’s primary good, despite their contribution to labor and economic stability in the United