Normalizing an American Right to Health

This book argues against the conventional wisdom that a U.S. right to health is out of reach. It shows that the necessary change is not extraordinary but familiar and that the law has already laid considerable groundwork in ordinary statutes and case law. This descriptive foundation, revealed through the application of well-accepted theories of rights, has simply yet to be either acknowledged as, or relied upon, for rights-building. The book then moves from the descriptive task of showing where a right to health already exists in our legal corpus to the prescriptive goal of showing how we could feasibly and meaningfully expand the right through ordinary policies that are widely used in other domains, including impact assessments and state-sponsored reinsurance.

By normalizing American health rights discourse and bringing a right to health, including a right to health care, within the domain of ordinary policy debate, this book arms health advocates for the sharp political contests over health that we face today. Amid the prevailing neoliberal, neo-Lochnerian ideologies that have led us to a dead-end, this book proposes a rival ethic that has been developing right under our noses, one focused on embodied justice, where the priority is squarely on the human and our capacity for suffering and flourishing.


Author: Christina S. Ho
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 04/25/2023
Pages: 296
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.21lbs
Size: 9.52h x 6.42w x 0.94d
ISBN: 9780197650592

About the Author

Christina S. Ho is a Professor of Law at Rutgers University where she teaches health law, administrative law, and South African Constitutional Law. Before teaching, she worked as a health policy staffer on the White House Domestic Policy Council, in Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate Office, and for John F. Tierney in the U.S. House of Representatives. She also served as Country Director for the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative China Program, and later worked at the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where she founded the China Health Law Initiative. Christina received her law and public policy degrees from Harvard Law School and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government respectively.