Topic: Healthcare as a Human Right
Country: Costa Rica
Delegate Name: Claire Fishman
School: Ann Arbor Community High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Costa Rica position papers GLIMUN 2012 committees
The right to life is the most essential, the most important of all individual rights. Without life, one cannot exercise any other right. And without health, one cannot have a high quality of life. Thus, Costa Rica recognizes the right to health as fundamental, something that must be maintained in order to ensure human dignity.
We are not alone in recognizing the importance of health, as it is also mentioned in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, two documents that Costa Rica fully supports. A state has the responsibility to protect the rights of their citizens. If there is a right to health, than states must act to protect that right. And the only way to promote health is to ensure access to healthcare.
We recognize healthcare as services meant to improve or protect any aspect of a person’s health. This means that a healthcare system must be involved in promotion, prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation. Health is a multi-layered, complex concept and it is essential that all of its parts be addressed, even as our understanding of health evolves. This means that there can be no simple, limiting definition of what healthcare is.
Accessibility to healthcare can be just as vague a concept as healthcare itself; it is certainly a deceptively complicated term. In order to be available to all, healthcare services must be free of discrimination, obtainable by those of all economic strata, available in all geographic areas of the country, and accessible for the disabled. Additionally, the information of all users of the system, both personal and general, must be readily available to them.
Costa Rica has found that it is best able to guarantee that its residents will have access to healthcare by having a state-run healthcare system, CCSS (Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social). For over seventy years, this system has produced exemplary results for relatively low costs. We are proud not only to have a healthcare system that is consistently ranked as one of the best in the Americas, but also to have the second highest life expectancy in the Americas. Having a public healthcare system does not preclude having a thriving private healthcare sector as well. Indeed, we have both, and residents are free to choose between them as they wish. Amid this wealth of choices, our residents still decide to support the public healthcare system. In fact, the percentage of healthcare funding provided by the Costa Rican government has steadily fallen over the years, dipping to 7.3% in 2001. We feel that the success of our healthcare system shows that a country need not be among the wealthiest of nations to provide for its residents’ health.
We are happy to share our expertise in the area of healthcare with other countries, and also wish to learn from their experiences. Currently, we have undertaken a number of bilateral and multilateral agreements focused around sharing knowledge about healthcare, and are also a part of many regional and international groups, such as the World Health Assembly (WHA), which focus on health policy. In order for healthcare to be improved globally, the international community must continue its dialogue on the best ways to do so.
The international community must agree that health–and by extension, healthcare–is an essential right. Try telling a child with a throbbing mouth, a new mother with a sick baby, or a grandmother suffering from arthritis that healthcare is a luxury, that they shouldn’t be guaranteed treatment, that their loved ones ought to have no guarantee of a reprieve from their pain. See if that makes any sense to them. Does it make sense to you?
