Conclusion: Contexts for the promise and peril of the right to health

As discussed in the Introduction to this volume, since the 1990s we have witnessed a surge of interest in the application of human rights to health and health care issues, including a growth of health rights litigation. But has this marriage of human rights and health care been a happy one? This book has explored the role of health rights in legal, socioeconomic, cultural, and political contexts, offering a comparative perspective on the role that law and human rights play in access to health care. Legal advocates for this approach, of course, hoped that human rights would be an important tool in battling discrimination and advancing equal access. In this book we have critically assessed whether it has played this role either directly (through courts) or in a larger, normative sense. In this latter regard, the rise of health rights is not solely a legal development - it also reflects a changing philosophical outlook on the state's obligations to the individual, as well as a changing understanding of the economics of health care (e.g., concerns about the efficacy of free-market allocation of health care).